Abstracts for Legal Defense--part 1

    Marvin Frandsen has educated himself in nudity law, and represented himself per se in several legal cases.  To prepare himself for those court appearances, Marvin has jotted down abstracts of the useful information contained in many books and other sources.

    By now, these abstracts run to more than 90 pages, so we presented them in five installments:

Part I--General
Part 2--Nudity in fashion A-K
Part 3--Nudity in fashion L-Z
Part 4--Psychological health & social effects A-K
Part 5--Psychological health & social effects K-Z

    Marvin writes:  It's definitely a work in progress.  I intend to return to it soon.  However, I'd certainly rather see the info get disseminated.


Marv Frandsen's Naturist Science Summary Notes


Case Law

1.    Parmelee v. United States, 113 F.2d 729 (D.C. Cir. 1940)

2.    People v. Hildabridle, 353 Mich. 562, 590, 92 N.W.2d 6 (Mich. 1958)

3.    State vs. Smith, 7 Cal 3rd 362--nudity itself not obscene.

3.    The District of Columbia Court of Appeals (see Duvallon v. District of Columbia, 515 A.2d 724 (1986)) had occasion to research the meaning of the common law.  Noting that "The common law of the District of Columbia consists of the common law of Maryland and the British statutes in force in Maryland in 1801," the DC Court of Appeals found that "In American jurisprudence ... the common law of indecent exposure is defined as 'the willful and intentional exposure of the private parts of one's body in a public place in the presence of an assembly', [50 AM. JR.  2d, Lewdness, Indecency and Obscenity @ 17-18 (1970)] ... The purpose of such laws is to protect the public from shocking and embarrassing displays of sexual activity' [67 C.J.S. Obscenity @ 10 at 49-50 (1978)]."

    As noted in 4 W. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES *169, common law referred specifically to " 'persons wilfully, openly, lewdly and obscenely exposing their persons in any street or public highway, or in the view thereof, or in any place of public resort with intent to insult any female' were rogues and vagabonds. (quoted in Dill v. State, supra, 24 Md.  App. at 698, 332 A.2d 690, 693 no. 2)." (page 67)

    Not only was the proscribed nudity specifically sexual nudity such as to shock the public, but the District of Columbia Court of Appeals also noted that: "Further, 'conviction of the offense requires proof [that one] ... intended by his conduct to direct public attention to his genitals ...' Id. @ 10 at 50." (page 66)

    Furthermore, in direct contradistinction to the Brevard County Ordinance, the DC Court of Appeals research into common law found that the common law was concerned primarily and only with exposure of the genitals, and not with exposure of the buttocks or breast. "English common law cases compel the conclusion that indecent exposure was limited to the exposure of the genitals." (page 67)

    The same conclusion was reached in 1991 in an Ohio court of appeals, which ruled that "we are convinced that, in its commonly understood meaning, the term does not include the female breast." (State v. Jetter, 599 N.E.2d 733 (Ohio App. 1 Dist. 1991))  Likewise, the Hamilton County Municipal Court in Ohio found that "In Ohio Jury Instructions, the term "private parts" is defined to mean "genitals."  4 Ohio Jury Instructions (1982), Section 507.09.  Likewise, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1981) 1042, defines "private parts" as follows:  'the external organs of sex ...'  A glance at Gray, Anatomy of the Human Body (29 Ed. 1973) 1331, verifies that the female generative organs are all located within the vaginal region, and none is anywhere near the breast area."  (State v. Parenteau, 564 N.E.2d 505, 506 (Ohio Mun. 1990)).   Likewise in the same case it is noted that "... the Supreme Court of Oregon held that '[i]t is hornbook law that, whenever and wherever the terms 'privates' or 'private parts' are used as descriptive of a part of the human body, they refer to the genital organs...' .

         Not a one of these three elements of common law are directed at Naturist-style nude recreation (or for that matter at any equivalent to thong bikinis).  As is abundantly established, Naturist recreation is not a sexual activity but an innocent enjoyment of the sensations of the body interacting with nature as our species was designed to do.  Thus Naturists do not fit the first criteria of common law, which is to be engaging in a display of sexual activity.  Naturists do not seek out the public streets but shun the clothed crowd and seek secluded and remote areas where like minds gather and offense is unlikely, thus avoiding the second prong of the common law.  And finally, as noted in more detail elsewhere Naturists do not seek to focus attention (theirs or others) upon their genitals but rather come to see and experience the whole body in context.


Nudity & Community Standards--POLLS in Chronological Order

"Gallup Poll."  Clothed with the Sun 3.2, 4 (1983).  [1983 Gallup poll shows 72% of Americans don't think designated c-o beaches should be against the law, 39% agreed such areas should be set aside by gov't.  1/3 said they might try going to one.  14% already tried coed nude recreation.]

"Most favor designating beaches for nude sunbathing."  Orlando Sentinel (16 April 1985).  [Sound Off callers, 73% favor designating beaches for nude sunbathing.  Similar to July 1983 when 82% in favor.  Not scientific, but "the results now as well as two years ago show that there are strong feelings in favor of nude beaches."]

"Polls Show We're Gaining in Numbers and Attitudes."  Clothed with the Sun 5.4, 3-4 (1986).  [1985 Roper Poll reports that 18% of all Americans, including 27% of those age 18-28, and 24% of college-educated Americans--had already gone swimming in the nude coed.  28% of liberals and 15% of conservatives say they've gone skinnydipping.]

Wallace, David.  "Sin."  People Weekly, 106-113 (10 Feb 1986).  [A 1986 poll conducted by People Weekly asked people how guilty they would feel if they engaged in any of 51 activities, rating their probable guilt on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 represented the greatest feeling of guilt.  Nude sunbathing came in second to last with a rating of 2.76, behind not voting (3.07), swearing (3.34), smoking (3.38), and overeating (4.43).]

"35% of Americans Would 'Bare It All.'"  Nude & Natural 10.1, 5 (1990).  [1990 Martini and Rossi poll reported that 35% of Americans would 'bare it all' on a nude beach.]

"Callers favor opening some beaches to nudity."  Florida Today (22 Sep 1992).  ["A strong 72% of the callers expressed support for the idea of allowing topless or nude bathing on certain public beaches.  Twenty-eight percent expressed disapproval of allowing bathers to slip out of their swimsuits to enjoy the sun and surf."]

"Most callers favor nude sunbathing at Playalinda."  Orlando Sentinel (18 May 1993). ["Should nude sunbathing be allowed in sections of Canaveral National Seashore?"  75% in favor, 25% against.]

"Views differ, depending on where you live."  Florida Today (9 Aug 1994).  [Percent saying nude sunbathing "is a problem":  North 46%, Central 27%, South 35%.]

"Nude sunbathing on public beach?  Yes, majority says."  Orlando Sentinel (21 May 1995).  ["Should there ben an area for nude sunbathing on public beaches?"  78% yes, 22% no.]

"A Public Opinion Poll, Concerning the Brevard County Public Nudity Ordinance Its Implementation, Enforcement and Method of Payment through Taxation."  BTV Opinion Research & Specialized Software, Inc..  Survey sponsored by Central Florida Naturists, Inc. (1995).

"Nude poll supports naturists."  Florida Today (29 Dec 1995).  [Scientific poll of registered voters.  "... 56% of Brevard's registered voters would favor setting aside a section of Playalinda Beach at Canaveral National Seashore for nude sunbathing.  About 38 percent are against the notion.  The naturists' poll also found about 54 percent of registered voters don't want any additional tax money spent on enforcing the law and 45 percent of voters don't want any officers assigned to enforce it.  Prof. Tipton of UF says poll methods are common and defensible.]

"Naked truth slides down poll."  Florida Today (30 Dec 1995).  [Tony Boylan Reporter Editorial, poll question validly neutral.]

"Just the bare facts:  Nudity ban is all wet."  Orlando Sentinel (30 Dec 1995).  [Columnist editorial, public is against nudity ban.]

"Nudist's Survey:  County supports nudity at Playalinda Beach."  News Observer (4 Jan 1996).

"Poll favors nudists."  Brevard Reporter (4 Jan 1996).

"Callers:  Don't ban nude sunbathing."  Orlando Sentinel (18 March 1997).  ["Should nude sunbathing be banned in Florida?"  28% Yes, 72% No.  "The results are consistent with sentiment in favor of nude sunbathing expressed in Sound Off in 1995, 1993 and 1985.  In fact, as long ago as July 1983, when Sound Off first asked about nude sunbathing, 5,488 people called, and 82 percent were in favor.  The libertarian attitude among callers is strong."]

"Polk Pulse:  Should nudity be allowed on Playalinda Beach?"  Lakeland Daily (20 July 1997).  [67% Yes, 33% No.]

"Naturist Poll Results."  Roper-Starch, New York, NY (10 October 2000).  ["Eight in 10 adult American say 'people who enjoy nude sunbathing should be able to do so without interference from officials as long as they do so at a beach that is accepted for that purpose.'  This is an increase from 1983 when 72% of Americans supported this.  Fewer than one in five American adults (17%) object today to nude sunbathing conducted in a designated area.  This is a drop from 1983, when one in four (24%) objected."]  ["Acceptance of nude sunbathing at designated beaches has increased most dramatically among women.  About two-thirds -- or 65% -- of women supported it in 1983.  Today three-quarters or 75% support it, an increase of 10 percentage points.  In addition, while 32% of women objected in 1983, just 22% object currently.  However, women are still more likely than men to have an objection."]  ["Support for setting aside special and secluded areas for nude sunbathing has also increased since 1983.  While Americans are split over this issue, currently about half or 48% of adults are in favor of this, compared to 39% in 1983--a gain of nine percentage points."]  ["One reason for this increasing support may be found in the numbers who have--or who are now willing to admit--personally participating in 'skinny dipping' or nude sunbathing.  One in four adult Americans now say they have done this.  While just 15% of adults said in 1983 that they had done this, in the 2000 poll 25% of adults say they have participated in this activity.  This increase in participation is seen most dramatically among men.  Just 21% of men said in 1983 that they had personally taken park in nudity for swimming or sunbathing, while 34% of men say they have in the 2000 poll.  Female participation -- or willingness to admit it -- has not changed as much since 1983 (10% vs. 16%)."]


Nudity & Community Standards--Other Than Polls

Seuss, Dr.  The Seven Lady Godivas.  First published in 1939.  [Late Dr. Seuss published approval of a nudist philosophy in one of his first books.]

Ford, Clellan S., and Beach, Frank A.  Patterns of Sexual Behavior.  New York: Harper, 1951.  [47:  Review of 190 world societies in 1951 found that, contrary to the standards of our own culture, relatively few considered exposure of a women's breasts to be immodest.]

"205 Arguments and Observations in Support of Naturism," Nude & Natural 16.1, 61-95.  pp. 89-90, fn 195.   ["Twenty-two states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin) specifically confine their statutory public exposure prohibitions solely to uncovered genitalia.  Statutes in Louisiana, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Mississippi, and Wyoming prohibit exposure of the breasts only where there is intent to arouse sexual desire, recklessness, or intent to cause affront or alarm.  Statutes in Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington prohibit acts that are done with recklessness or intent for their obscene or alarming nature, and North Carolina, Florida, and West Virginia's statutes are ambiguous with regard to exposure of the breasts."]

Moore 10, 20-22.  (From "205 Arguments" fn 141.  L and M references are missing from "205 Arguments.".)  [A study by Dr. Steven D. Moore of the University of Arizona demonstrated that encountering nude bathers on public land is five times more acceptable to the public than encountering hunters.]


Nudity and Physical Health

Kumar, Savita, Hlady, W. Gary and Malecki, Jean M.  "Risk Factors for Seabather's Eruption:  A Prospective Cohort Study"  Public Health, Journal of the U.S. Public Health Service, pp. 59-62 (Jan-Feb 1997)

Palmer, Gabrielle.  The Politics of Breastfeeding.  London: Palmer, 1988.  [Corsets and, in modern times, cosmetic breast surgery damages the internal physiology of the breasts, often eliminating the capacity to breast-feed.]


    Nudity and Fashion in History
    [to be presented in future installments]


Nudity and Religion

Ableman, Paul.  Anatomy of Nakedness.  Los Angeles, CA:  Elysium Growth Press, 1982.  [40: Several Christian sects have practiced nudity as part of their faith, including the German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the thirteenth century; the Picards, in fifteenth century France; and, most famously, the Adamites, in the early fifteenth century Netherlands.]

Walker, Barbara G.  The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.  San Francisco:  Harper, 1983.  [In many pre-Christian pagan religions, such as those practiced in western Europe and Great Britain, nudity--especially female nudity--was a powerful force, and played an important role in pagan worship and rituals.]

Ward, Roy Bowen, "Women in Roman Baths," Harvard Theological Review 85:2, 125-147 (1992) [Early Christians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian make it clear they had no ethical reservations about communal nudity, see above under history.]

Ward, Roy Bowen.  "Why Must Public Nudity Be Deemed Immoral by Judges?"  Nude & Natural 11.1, 97 (1991).  [For first several centuries of Christianity, it was the custom to baptize men, women, and children together nude.  This ritual played a very significant role in the early church.]


Nudity and Tourism

"Advantages of Tourism for Brevard County," The Brevard Reporter (2 June 1994). [1.3 million visitors annually to Space Coast.  $375 M in 1992 = 12% of all taxable sales.  20,000 Brevard County residents employed in tourism.  Directly or indirectly, 30,000 jobs and $260 M in wages.  Average tourist spends $375 per trip in Brevard County.]

Mason, Richard.  "Skinnydippers bolster local economy," News Observer (12 January 1995).  [Economic effects of 1993 citations of naturists.  Tourist business in N. Brevard off 15-20%.  Business back up in 1994.]

Coleman, Lisa and Rees, Matt.  "Naked Appeal."  Forbes 150.8, 138 (12 Oct 1992).  [Nudism brings in about $120 M per year in direct revenues alone.]

Grossman, Nikki.  Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel (7 Sep 1995).  [Grossman, director of the Ft. Lauderdale Convention and Visitor's Bureau, states that "requests for nude or top-free beaches rank among the top five priorities of international conventioneers".]

"Tourism's Fastest Growth Sector."  Fodor's 'Europe 1998' edition.  p. 5 [Nudism is tourism's fastest growing sector.]

Sydney Visitors Guide, Spring 1998.  Published by Pacific Access Pty Ltd, 8 glen Street, Milsons Point, NSW 2061     ACN 051 775 556   p. 11 [Openly features nude beach as a tourist attraction.]


Nudity--Psychological Health and Positive Social Effects
    [to be presented in future installments]


Naturist Magazine Sources

1.    Bacher, K.  "205 Arguments and Observations in Support of Naturism."  
    Nude & Natural  16.1

2.    "All-American Boyhood," P. LeValley, Naturally 25, 11-13 (Winter 1997).

3.    "The Benefits of Social Nudity, C. Lonberger, Naturally 25, 6-8 (Winter 1997).

4.    "Nudity and body acceptance," A. Montagu, Nude & Natural 12(1), 13-21 (1992).


Naturist Quote Sources

Naturally, Fall 1994, p. 34 (NY shorts arrest in 1965)

Naturally, Winter/Spring 1992, p. 31 (Archaeology journal quote by Plato on Greeks rising above nudity taboo)

Clothed With the Sun 8.3, p. 10 (Compare Danish and American body image)

Nude & Natural 11.1. p. 13 (Women ignorant of female breast visual reality)

Nude & Natural 11.2, p. 106-107 (Smith quote on nudity deprivation = addict)

Nude & Natural 11.2, p. 108 (Jan Smith quote on antidote to pornography)

Nude & Natural 12.2, p. 43 (Men topless on beach at Coney Island)

Nude & Natural 14.3, p. 73 (85% of American women have body image disorder)

Nude & Natural 14.3, p. 73 (Eleanor Roosevelt quote, wished prettier)

Nude & Natural 15.1, p. 66 (Paul Bindrim, self-image based on body-image)

Nude & Natural 15.1, p. 66 (quote from Goodson on early childhood)

Nude & Natural 15.2, p. 34 (cultural taboo comparisons by Nicky Hoffman)


    Bibliography:  Abstracts for Legal Defense--part 2

    We continue Marvin Frandsen's abstracts of published works--useful for legal defense in nudity cases.  These listings quote in much fuller detail than the first batch.

Nudity and Fashion in History

Ableman, Paul.  Anatomy of Nakedness.  London, Great Britain: Orbis Publishing, 1982.  ISBN 0-85613-175-8.  [19-20: "From the sixteenth century onwards, clothed Europeans regularly [20] encountered naked primitives all over the world.  The Spanish in South America came upon naked Indians in Brazil and elsewhere.  Captain Cook found naked, or unconcealed, islanders in Polynesia and New Zealand.  Later British, French, Germans and Portuguese, among others, came into contact with naked Africans.  ... But it was not until the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries that they made much attempt to change them.  Then came the missionaries, and the first aspect of primitive life to experience their reforming zeal was inevitably the nakedness of the potential new recruits to Christianity.  Doubtless most of the missionaries meant well, but they proved a greater force for ruin than the simpler and more brutal traders and explorers."][20: "The missionaries were usually disconcerted to find that the biblically recommended act of 'clothing the naked', far from producing an improvement in native morals, almost always resulted in deterioration.  What the missionaries were inadvertently doing was recreating the Garden of Eden situation.  Naked, the primitive cultures had shown no prurient concern with the body, although morals were often, by civilized standards, rather lax."][20: "Naked people actually feel shame when they are first dressed.  They develop an exaggerated awareness of the body.  It is as if Adam and Eve's 'aprons' generated the 'knowledge of good and evil' rather than being its consequence.  But the disruption caused by the missionaries went far deeper as a result of the vital fact that very few primitives are totally naked.  They almost all have ornamentation or body-modification of some kind, which plays  a central role in their culture."][20: "Among many primitives, tattooing, scarification and ornamentation convey highly elaborate information which may, in fact, be the central regulatory force in the society.  the missionary thus, at one blow, annihilates a culture.  It was probably no less traumatic for a primitive society to be suddenly clothed than it would be for ours to be suddenly stripped naked."][20: "And if primitives lost their culture, they also lost their environment.  They lost the sun, the rain, the grass underfoot, the foliage which brushed their skin as they moved through forest or jungle, the water of lake, river or sea slipping past their bodies, above all the ceaseless communion with the wind.  Anyone who has ever spent any time naked outdoors knows that the play of the elements over the body produces an ever-changing response that may reach almost erotic intensity.  The kin becomes alive and response and a while new spectrum of sensation is generated.  Clothe the body and this rich communion is replaced by mere fortuitous, and often irritating, contact with inert fabric.  It is a huge impoverishment and its measure can perhaps best be judged by the reluctance of the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, who live in a climate so harsh that Darwin observed snow melting on the naked breasts of women, to adopt protective clothing.  They preferred dermal contact with the environment, hostile though it was, to the loss of sensation implied by wearing clothes."][31: "The men of Pongo in French West Africa refused to allow their women to be clothed because this would immediately make them more seductive.  Modesty, it is probably fair to say, in the sense of hiding the 'shameful parts' develops only after the habitual use of clothing."][38: "The New Testament might have ameliorated the severity of the ancient Hebrew sexual taboos had it not been for the character of its chief apostle, Paul.  He was a native of Tarsus where all the women were covered and veiled from head to foot and it might be said that through the vehemence with which he fulminated against unlawful sex and immodesty he managed to extend the borders of Tarsus to encompass the whole globe."][38: "St Chrysostom spoke of Roman women appearing nude in public, especially at the theatres, without shame or embarrassment.  Plato recommended naked exercises for both sexes.  Girls danced naked at Spartan feasts.  Hippocrates, the father of medicine, recommended nude exposure to the sun as a cure as far back as 400 B.C.."][40: "Some Christian sects adopted a defiant nakedness to stress their true, fundamentalist purity.  The most recent of these has been the Doukhobors, originally a Russian group founded in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Because they ere pacifists, and rejected all external authority, the Doukhobors were in more or less continual conflict with the authorities.  After being shunted around Russia for a century, seven thousand of them emigrated to Canada in 1899 in the hope of finding freedom to live in their own way.  But the Canadian authorities kept trying to educate their children and extract taxes from the Doukhobors.  The Doukhobors retaliated by marching naked on those they considered to be their persecutors.  Large numbers were arrested.  The naked marches have continued until quite recently although it seems the Doukhobors are slowly being assimilated into Canadian life."][40: "In the fifteenth century, the Picards in Flanders worshiped naked and revered the body and before them, the Adamites in Bohemia, considered heretics and exterminated by John Zizka in 1421, not only went about naked to symbolize the innocence of Adam but practiced free love in order to liberate the flesh.  They taught that nakedness was essential to real purity and to the restoration of the innocence that had existed before the Fall."][41: "The alleviation of barrenness in women is often magically helped by nakedness.  Thus, in India, a barren woman, in order to make herself fertile, had to remove all her clothes and circle a fig tree 108 times, wrapping it round with a cotton thread."][41: "In East Prussia, women sowed peas naked, in order to stimulate the vine to produce an abundance of the phallic fruit.  In the Philippines, among the members of the Tagalog tribe, when a woman was in labour, it was the duty of her husband to climb onto the roof naked and brandish a sword and shield at the sky.  In the meantime, naked friends below staged a mock fight.  The purpose of this performance was to distract and frighten any evil spirits that might be lurking about in order to harm the mother and child."][41-42: "St Paul, although a subtle theologian, was also a man of his times.  He insisted on women covering their heads to prevent devils [42] penetrating them through their ears.  The custom is, of course, preserved in contemporary Christian worship but few women, donning their best hats for Sunday morning service, realize that they are doing so to avoid diabolic impregnation."][42: "In May, 1979, Emperor Bokassa, in reality a minor Central African tyrant, arrested a large number of children on charges of sedition and massacred some of them.  According to The Guardian (London) of 18 May, 'Hundreds of women demonstrated naked outside of the prison until the survivors were released.'  These women were not consciously employing magic to procure the release of their children but they were making use of the age-old coercive power of the naked body."][43: "Freud assumes that children will not normally see each other naked and that, if they do happen to, the result will be traumatic.  This is not true of naked cultures.  He assumes that sexual play and masturbation will be ruthlessly suppressed and punished.  Again, this is not true of naked cultures.  Thus great provinces of Freud's mind-empire would simply be missing.  There would be no Oedipus complex (or not much, anyway), no penis envy or castration complex, probably no clear-cut phases of sexual development.  We are emerging rapidly from the era of Freudian gospel, while retaining respect fro the Viennese doctor as a true originator, and can now perceive the extent to which he himself as the victim of prevailing ideas and prejudices."][51-52: "It is a striking fact that naked peoples do not produce naturalistic images of the human body.  They may draw birds, animals, trees and plants with great skill and representational power, but the body is almost always distorted.  There is no paradox.  If one asks why they represent nature reasonably accurately but distort the body, the answer is that there are far more important things to be said about the body, and represented allegorically and symbolically in painting and sculpture, than its mere surface appearance.  A bird or tree may be magically distorted or it may be shown as it is.  But, to people surrounded by the naked human forms, there seems little point in reproducing them in wood, stone or [52] pigment.  What is important about the body is its fierceness, its frailty, its nobility, its fertility, its creativity and many other attributes which naturalistic paintings generally do not show.  Therefore primitive representations of the body--which Picasso and others have rightly taught us to esteem if not always to understand--are almost invariably symbolic constructs which have a mythical or magical significance.  It is only a concealed culture which can become obsessed with the surface appearance of people."][68: "Thus, in mid-Victorian England, when the body was perhaps least tolerated, not only did prostitution flourish but there were curious anomalies in people's attitudes to nakedness.  The bathing-suit had not yet been invented and sea-bathing was becoming fashionable.  The Reverend Francis Kilvert, noted in his diary that in Weston-Super-Mare in 1872: 'There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running down naked to the sea, where ... the red morning sunshine (was) glowing upon the naked limbs of the bathers.'  At Sandown, two years alter, he beheld:  'One beautiful girl ... entirely naked on the sand ... She seemed a Venus Anadyomene fresh risen from the waves.'  But at nearby Shanklin he noted with disgust that 'one has to adopt the detestable custom of bathing in drawers.' "][68: "Perhaps surprisingly, the true delights of bathing seem to be most fully appreciated by people who live in unconcealed and relatively unsuppressed cultures.  The Polynesians rejoiced in bathing.  It was normal for them to bathe two or three times a day.  The Japanese, who traditionally felt no shame about the body and little about sex, have a long tradition of bathing which has not been widely reported to have degenerated into debauchery.  Rather it has acquired a mystique of almost spiritual virtue."][69-71: discussion of public defecation in European history.][75: "In fact, nakedness in eleventh-century England, where the great hall of the castle was likely to be the only warm room, was far from uncommon and the contemporary force of the story [Lady Godiva] derives largely from the rank of the lady.  It was the fact that an aristocrat rendered herself vulnerable before the common people that supplied the coercive power of the deed."][87: "In 1979, a Bournemouth councilor remarked (and The Observer reprinted in its 'Sayings of the Week' column), 'Naturists would pollute the beach.'  Her indignation had been provoked by a proposal that Brighton, and other English seaside resorts, should initiate official 'naturist beaches'.  Now naked sea-bathers on the English coast would be no new thing.  As a columnist in the Evening Standard said, 'The Brighton fathers are merely resurrecting a custom which was common on our beaches throughout most of history and ending a ban which has only a century of tradition behind it.'  People have bathed naked in the sea since people started to bathe at all."]

"Alexander Graham Bell was one of us."  Clothed with the Sun 8.3, 10 (1988).  [Alexander Graham Bell was a skinnydipper and nude sunbather.]

Bonfante, Lisa.  "The Naked Greek."  Archaeology 43.5, 28-35 (September 1990).  [Naked Greek athletics common by mid 6th century BCE.  Women were not naked in public in Athens; however, Spartan women participated nude in some rituals and athletic events, and in certain circumstances had the freedom of partial nudity in their social dress.]

Bonfante, Lisa.  "Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art."  American Journal of Archaeology 93.4, 543-570 (October 1989).  [543:  "Among the innovations of the ancient Greeks that changed our way of seeing the world, one of the most prominent is a certain kind of public nudity--nudity as a costume.  This is a surprising phenomenon.  That we have not been more surprised by it is due to the fact that we follow in their tradition and take the Greeks as models, forgetting how often their institutions and attitudes made them the exception, and not the rule, among ancient peoples.  The Greeks of the Classical world did not forget.  While not, as we shall see, fully understanding the significance of the custom, they were proud of its singularity."][544: "In a clothed society, however, nakedness is special, and can be used as a 'costume.' "][546: "In the Old Testament nakedness always signifies poverty, shame, slavery, humiliation. ... But the Greeks were to turn the concept around and to see the beauty and pride of the male human body, without cover or adornment."][546:  "Herodotus and Thucydides correctly saw athletic nudity as a costume-much more than a costume!-that separated the Greeks from other people. ... He [Thucydides], too, emphasizes this basic contrast between Greeks and barbarians; adding the fact that the custom separated the Greeks from their own past as well."][547: "The Greek word for naked, or nude, is gymnos, and shows something new in the ancient world.  The word refers to total nudity. ... The word had become something new, just as the Greeks had made something new of the ancient social, religious, and magic taboo of nudity in daily life.  For while the word for 'naked' had universally--in the Bible, for example-been used to mean 'poor,' 'wretched,' or 'miserable,' in Classical Greek the word rarely means 'poor.' "][554, re: women: "Here, too, age groups were distinguished by their costumes:  in the foot race, some bared one breast, and wore short dresses; others ran naked.  The ritual nakedness of the women, however, did not initiate them into the life of a warrior or a soldier:  it prepared them for marriage and the private life of child-bearing and a family, and therefore it did not develop further as a feature of Greek public life and culture.  As we shall see, Plato, like other Greeks, was conscious of the connection between nakedness, exercise, and war, and took the logical but bold step of imagining that the women who would be guardians alongside the men must also exercise naked alongside them.  It was evidently the Spartan model that most easily came to mind.  There it was most important in the agoge or parade of the boys and the spectacle of the gymnopaidia.  There, too, the women exercised and exposed themselves as much as the men.  So the story grew up that athletic nudity had been invented by the Spartans."] [554: "Like the symposium, athletic nudity was a creation of Archaic Greece brought about by the rise of the hoplites.  These men attended the gymnasium, and proudly wore the 'costume' that was appropriate for this place.  The gymnasium functioned as military institution, public banquet-hall, court, auditorium, country club, and university."][555: "The Greeks were proud of their soldiers' physique and of the tan skin that was the result of their exercising in the nude.  A story about Agesilaos of Sparta illustrates how, to a practiced military eye, nakedness allowed an accurate judgment of a man's physical fitness:  'He gave instructions ... that the barbarians captured in the raids be exposed for sale naked.  So when his soldiers saw them white because they never stripped, and fat and lazy through constant riding in carriages, they believed that the war would be exactly like fighting with women.'  The contrast between their own bronzed men's bodies and the white, feminine flabbiness of the Persians renewed the courage of the Greek troops."][556:  "The women were kept covered because it meant they were protected, not exposed to danger.  The relation of this manly nudity to the nudity of the gods is also crucial:  the gods could be nude because they relied on themselves."][557: "The introduction of athletic nudity into the everyday life of the gymnasium and palaestra was part of the 'modern' way of life, freer, simpler, more democratic, according to Thucydides.  It was the dress, one might almost say the uniform, of the citizen who exercised in order to maintain himself in readiness for military services. ... Civic nudity marked a break with the barbarians ..."][557-558: "While Thucydides explains Greek nudity in the context of democracy, Plato explains it as a result of the logical, rational way of thinking of which the Greeks were so proud.  In a passage in which he obviously has the Spartan model in mind, Plato imagines the situation that would arise of women were to have an equal role with men in society.  'If, then, we use the women for the same things as the men, they must also be taught the same things.  Now music and gymnastic were given to the men.  These two arts, and what has to do with war, must be assigned to the women also, and they must be used in the same ways.  Perhaps, compared to what is habitual, many of the things now being said would look ridiculous if they were done as is said.  The most ridiculous thing (being) the women exercising naked with the men in the palaestras, not only the young ones, but even the older ones, too, like the old men in the gymnasium who, when they are wrinkled and not pleasant to the eye, all the same love gymnastic. --By Zeus, he said, that would look ridiculous in the present state of things.--Well, since we've started to speak, we mustn't be afraid of all the jokes-of whatever kind-the wits might make if such a change took place in gymnastic, in music, and not the least, in the bearing of arms and the riding of horses.  But since we've begun to speak, we must make our way to the rough part of the law, begging these men ... to be serious; and reminding them that it is not so long ago that it seemed shameful and ridiculous  to the Greeks--as it does now to the many among the barbarians--to see men naked; and that when the Cretans originated the gymnasiums, and then the Lacedaemonians, it was possible for the urbane of the time to make a comedy of all that.  But, I suppose, when it became clear to those who used these practices that to uncover all such things is better than to hide them, then what is ridiculous to the eyes disappeared in the light of what's best ... And this showed that he is empty who believes anything is ridiculous other than the sight of the foolish and the bad; or, again, he who looks seriously to any standard of beauty he sets up other than the good. ... Then the women guardians must strip, since they'll clothe themselves in virtue instead of robes, and they must take common part in war and the rest of the city's guarding, and must not do other things.  ... And the man who laughs at naked women practicing gymnastic for the sake of the best, 'plucks from his wisdom an unripe fruit for ridicule' and doesn't know--as it seems--at that he laughs or what he does.  For this is surely the fairest thing that is aid and will be said--the beneficial is fair and the harmful ugly.' " [cite Pl. Resp. 5.452a-e.  Transl. A. Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York 1968), adapted.][558: "For women in Greek art, literature, and life, the taboo against nudity remained in full force, with all its sense of humiliation and vulnerability as well as its magic power."][559: "Exceptions confirm the special character of nudity in women.  Women occasionally participated in athletic and ritual nudity.  Spartan women danced naked in certain initiation rites, as we know from literature.  Girls also took part in a footrace at the festival of Hera at Olympia, as Pausanias tells us; it has recently been suggested that Spartan practice may have influenced Olympic contests.  The physical education of Spartan girls is well attested; they were organized in age groups like the boys.  Because Spartan women had a reputation for beauty, and for dressing in a way that exposed their bodies, Attic tragedy and comedy contain innumerable references to these characteristics, as well as to the immorality they were though to imply.  These are still echoed by Propertius (3.14.1-4), who marvels at the blessings of a girls' gymnasium, where a naked girl can wrestle with the men."][561: "Gods can afford to be naked, or to look upon nakedness, without being diminished.  In Greek art men participate to some extent in this divine nudity.  But naked or partially naked women are defenseless."][561: "The equality among male citizens in the political life of the city, based on their equality on the battlefield in the hoplite phalanx, widened the distance between public and private life, and consequently between the worlds of men and women."][562: discussion of less welcoming attitude among Romans, but enthusiastically naked fighting by the Gauls, albeit with some military disadvantage due to their not being trained naked.]

"College Nude Swims."  Nude & Natural 11.3, 114-115 (1992).  [Many YMCA, college, and high school male-only pools or swimming classes were historically 'swimsuit-optional' or nude-only until federally-mandated 'equal access' athletic programs (for the sake of the women) were instituted in the mid 1970's.]

"The Double Standard:  The White House Skinnydippers."  Clothed with the Sun 8.3, 10-11 (1988).  [President Lyndon Johnson occasionally swam nude with guests in the white house pool, including evangelist Billy Graham.]

Dunlap, Knight.  "The Development and Function of Clothing," Journal of General Psychology, vol. i, 64-78 (1928). [65: "It may sound facetious, but it is both metaphorically and literally true to say that every time woman lifts her skirts the moralists shiver.  Yet this is not the only way in which she has frightened them with her clothes.  Some years ago, shoulder puffs, and baggy sleeves, were denounced as indecent and ungodly.  The shudders over the one-piece bathing suit have not yet subsided, in spite of the valiant missionary work of Mack Sennett.  That bobbing the hair flaunted indecency, threatened the foundations of morality, and endangered the sanctity of the home, even the College Freshman can remember.  He probably does not know, however, that not many years ago, putting up the hair on top of the head was also looked upon with fear and indignation."][65: "The moralists being mainly male, and hence very much interested in woman sexually, it is natural that the greater emphasis in modesty should be on the modesty of woman."][65: "This modesty theory of clothing seems still to be firmly intrenched among the ignorant, in spite of the various lines of evidence against it.  Its falsity should have been evident long ago from the fact that oriental women  have had to conceal their faces to be modest, while occidental women have not been under similar necessity; and the fact that naked savages are often more modest (and more moral too, for that matter), than clothed Europeans.  That women are as modest now in knee-length skimpiness as they ever were in hoop skirts and sidewalk sweepers, should be apparent even to those whose knowledge extends no farther than their village boundaries."][66: "As a matter of observable fact, the connection between clothing and modesty is a simple one.  Any degree of clothing, including complete nudity, is perfectly modest as soon as we become thoroughly accustomed to it.  Conversely, any change in clothing, suddenly effected, may be immodest if it is of such a nature as to be conspicuous.  This is particularly true for men of limited intelligence and low education.  The more highly cultured and educated individuals adjust themselves to  new conditions with less shock.  Clothing itself has no modesty or immodesty.  It is merely the breaking of the established convention which makes it immodest."][66-67: "There is today no reasonable doubt that clothing has nothing intrinsically to do with modesty or immodesty, although changes in costume, in either direction, may have salacious effects.  Either clothing or naked-[67]ness may be worn modestly or immodestly.  The only modesty of clothing is its wontedness; the only immodesty, the suggestion that it might be removed."][68: "Skirts and aprons of grass and leaves, and bunches of leaves hung at other points of the body are really worn by savages in various parts of the world.  Similar dangling garments made from the skins of animals, or their tails, and sketchy garments woven from vegetable fibers, are also widely popular among savages. ... The fact that the peoples who wear these garments put no emphasis on concealment, but at times discard the garments entirely; and the fact that where there is a costume which can not be discarded in public, it is apt to be some non-concealing article such as a string of beads around the waist, dispose of these explanations ..."][69: "Now, what sort of protection is most adequate against flies and similar insects?  Wrapping skins or cloth tightly around the body is successful, but to persons unaccustomed to such unhygienic clothing, especially in warm climates, this method is intolerable.  Much more efficient protection is afforded by hanging strings, leaves, strips of hide, animal's tails, and similar articles so that they will flap with the movements of the wearer.  In other words, the best fly chasers are exactly the garments most characteristic of savages and primitive man."][69: "An apron of burlap or cloth is sometimes bestowed on cows in fly-time.  In short, the fly-protections we have customarily used on our domestic animals are exactly of the types of primitive human clothing which have baffled the early anthropologists."][70-71: "The association of clothing and modesty developed slowly.  The Greek girl cast off her garments in public when it became incon-[71]venient.  Even in the Middle Ages in Europe, when women wore skirts but no underwear, the incidental exposure of the genitals had no specific flavor of indecency.  The savage discards his aprons or loin cloth when it is not needed, with no sense of shame, and with no effect on the sexual sensitivity of his fellows.  In Japan, men and women appear naked in public without any effect on modesty, although ordinarily fully draped.  The modesty of clothing seems to have appeared only when through the invention of elaborate and costly materials and expensive dyes, it became possible to display one's wealth and indicate one's social position by the mere quality of valuable clothing worn.  Then began the practice of completely enveloping the person in expensive cloths, laces, velvets, feathers and gold work.  Clothing as a badge made the concealment of the person habitual for the upper classes, although not until much later for the lower and poorer classes.  It must not be forgotten that among certain races there is a similar modesty of ornament, and that among certain African tribes a woman without her significant string of beads around her waist, (although she might wear nothing else), would be as ashamed and dishonored as would be a European woman caught stark naked."][72: "During the period in which wealth and social status could be indicated by the amount of clothing worn, the habit of concealing women's legs became established.  Hence, with the beginning of modern styles, the exposure of the ankle was indecent.  That is to say, the ankle having been hidden from view, its exposure attracted attention, and of course strongly suggested other, still concealed portions of the anatomy.  With each increasing public revelation of the leg, the same salacity was introduced, but with lessening effect.  We become accustomed to the conventional exposure, whatever it is, and with a serious of changes we become accustomed to the fact of change itself.  hence, the exposure of the thigh will occasion only a minor commotion, as compared with that which was produced by the exposure of the ankle.  I have no doubt that within a few years women will exposure the entire body in public, with negligible effect on modesty and morals, unless for the better, for this is no denying that although neither clothing nor nudity have any intrinsic value for modesty, clothing has the greater potentiality for immodesty, since it has the power of suggesting what is concealed."][77: "The story of clothing is now practically complete.  Having its primitive origin in practical protective needs, its amplification and retention under conditions which render it practically unnecessary, has been fostered by the resistance to sexual competition which is today the strongest force operating against dress reform for both sexes.  Bobbed hair, the short skirt, and the peekaboo waist may be denounced in the names of sexual modesty and sexual morality; but their real objectionableness lies in their furtherance of sexual competition.  The attack on the one-piece bathing suit may have been headed by male moralists, but its energy was supplied by women who had good reasons to distrust their ratings in a bathing beauty contest."][78: "Progress is retarded by a professed moral censorship that is really vicious.  Every activity in this direction has proved itself ridiculous and obstructive.  The restraint of sexual competition may be useful in certain stages of society, but this usefulness, if it occurs, soon disappears.  When we shall have returned to the primitive basis of clothing, as a means of protection and nothing more, we will have lost most of our problems of sexual morality, and sexual immodesty will have disappeared along with its reflection, sexual modesty."]

Ellis, Havelock.  Studies in the Psychology of Sex.  New York:  Random House, 1936.  Vol. 1, part 1, pp. 8-27.  [Nudity normal for indigenous peoples.]  58-62. [Clothing developed to focus sexual attention.]  Ellis, vol. 2, part 3, p. 98. ["in daily life ... a considerable degree of nakedness was tolerated during medieval times.  This was notably so in the public baths, frequented by men and women together."]  Ellis, vol. 2, part 3, p. 98.  [Several Christian sects have practiced nudity as part of their faith, including the German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the thirteenth century; the Picards, in fifteenth century France; and, most famously, the Adamites, in the early fifteenth century Netherlands.]

Fagan, Garrett G.  Bathing in Public in the Roman World.  Ann Arbor, MI:  University of Michigan Press, 1999.  ISBN 0-472-10819-0.  [1: "Due in part to the thorough dissemination of efficient hydraulic and heating systems and also to a long-standing Christian heritage of abhorrence of bodily functions and public nudity, most Westerners bathe privately in their own homes.  The same is not true the world over, however ..."] [1-2: "In western Europe, only the Finns still practice a truly public bathing habit. ... Finns prefer to take their saunas in the company of family members and friends rather than alone.  Business conferences and even government cabinet meetings can convene there."] [3: "Like the Romans, the Japanese bathe communally in hot water; nudity is an accepted facet of the public bathing process ... In their heyday, the public baths of Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka were social centers, where lovers met, philosophers debated, and commoners gossiped.  In fact, some modern commentators are of the opinion that the decline of the sento, the neighborhood public bath, has led to a concomitant decline in community spirit, so that despite baths at home, some Japanese still take an occasional trip to the local public bathhouse."] [3: "While medieval Westerners were espousing the principle of 'going unwashed' (alousia) to prove the dominance of the soul over corporeal weakness, Islamic civilization was adhering to the public bathing habits of the ancients and preserving them for the modern age."] [24-25: "Martial and a chorus of other sources strongly imply that nudity was the norm in the baths."] [26: "the attested bathing together of men and women comes as a shock to many modern sensibilities, as well as to some ancient ones"] [26: "Clement of Alexandria comments that one could meet noble ladies naked in the baths"]  [27-28: Mixed gender (nude) bathing common in Roman Empire but likely varied from region to region or establishment to establishment, much in same way that nude sunbathing is variously practiced on the beaches of modern Europe.  For Martial, bathing with women was a matter of course.]  [48: Romans disapproved of father and son bathing together.]  [77-78: "it is safe to say that life in a Roman town was considerably more communal than is the case among Westerners today. ... the living quarters of the humble often lacked amenities considered absolutely fundamental in modern residences; many had no kitchens, latrines, or baths.  As a consequence, many functions performed inside in private today were conducted by the Romans outdoors, in full public view. ... Public latrines, likewise, show a degree of openness that is shocking to modern sensibilities.  Many are multiple-seaters, in which patrons attend to bodily functions, apparently in full view of others; and there is no indication of male/female segregation.  There could hardly be a better illustration of the communality of living in Roman towns."] [197: "When husbands and wives visited the baths together, they seem to have brought their children along."]  

"Famed Nudist Richter's Personal Legacy Lost in Quake."  Nude & Natural 13.4, 6 (1994).  [Charles F. Richter, the co-inventor of the earthquake measuring system, was a life-long nudist and Naturist.]

Flugel, John Carl.  The Psychology of Clothes.  London:  Hogarth, 1930, 1940, 1950. [16-17: "Apart from the fact that the human race probably had its beginnings in the warmer regions of the earth, the example of certain existing primitive peoples, notably the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, shows that clothing is not essential, even in a damp and chilly climate.  In this matter Darwin's often-quoted observations of the snow melting on the skins of these hardy savages, seems to have brought home to a somewhat startled nineteenth-century generation that their own snug garments, however cosy and desirable they might appear, were not inexorably required by the necessities of the human constitution."][17: "The great majority of scholars, however, have unhesitatingly regarded decoration as the motive that led, in the first place, to the adoption of clothing, and consider that the warmth-and-modesty-preserving functions of dress, however important they might later on become, were only discovered once the wearing of clothes had become habitual for other reasons. ... The anthropological evidence consists chiefly in the fact that among the most primitive races there exist unclothed but not undecorated peoples."][27: "We know, however, that a great many articles of dress, such as the shoe, the tie, the  hat, the collar, and even larger and more voluminous garments, such as the coat, the trousers, and the mantle may be phallic symbols, while the shoe, the girdle, and the garter (as well as most jewels) may be corresponding female symbols. ... we can easily establish the existence of a continuous transition, from blatant exhibition of the actual genitals to the totally unconscious symbolisation of them by garments which resemble them but very little."][27-28:"... for about fifty years during Tudor times, the tightness of male nether garments necessitated the housing of the genitals in a special bulging portion of the hose (the cod-piece)--a portion to which attention was sometimes gratuitously drawn by a vivid or contrasting colour, and which was further sometimes embellished by padding in such a way as to simulate a perpetual erection.  Our next stage may be taken from a somewhat earlier period, when the phallic substitute was found, not near the genital region itself but on a remote part of the body, namely the feet.  There was at one time in the Middle Ages a tendency to fashion the long shoe, known as the poulaine, in the shape of the phallus, and this practice enjoyed a lengthy popularity in spite of the storm of indignation which it aroused."][57-58: "Taking actual examples from modern history, we meet, on the one hand, with denunciations of bare shoulders, bare bosoms, and bare arms (which latter were 'looked upon with horror and disgust' in Henry VIII.'s time), of the general scantiness of attire that characterised the close of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, and of the exposed legs of to-day, which, in Italy at any rate, have encountered both governmental [58] and ecclesiastical condemnation.  On the other hand, we have had almost equally fiery denunciations of peaked shoes, high head-dresses, and long trains, and it has been maintained that the mere possession of numerous garments was a spiritual peril; for at least one woman, we are told, was taken to Hell by the Devil because she had 'tenne diverse gownes and as mani cotes'."][58: "Whatever the cause, however, it is clear enough that, in the history of European dress, there have been successive waves of modesty which condemned what a previous generation had tolerated, both as regards exposure of the body and as regards elaboration of apparel.  Thus we ourselves tend to regard as immodest both the exposure of the bosom, characteristic of the middle of the last century, and the accentuation of the buttocks that was implied in the bustles of the later period."][58-59: "Since novelty of any kind (being itself, where clothing is concerned, a form of display) is apt to arouse not only curiosity but modesty, the covering of a part of the body that had habitually been exposed may itself arouse feelings of shame.  Thus it has been reported that savage women who have been used to nakedness may become [59] shy and embarrassed if a part of their body is suddenly clothed; and similar feelings have been aroused during the past year in some of our own young girls when they found themselves arrayed for the first time in their lives in (evening) dresses that hid their legs from view.  It is as if the impulse of modesty had penetrated all disguise and understood the erotic element that constitutes an essential factor in all efforts at bodily concealment."][66: "Recently, for instance, there has taken place a revolutionary change in our ideas concerning the respectability of the feminine leg, and women now show freely what has, with very few exceptions, been draped since the dawn of Western civilisation.  How great is the change that has taken place in a relatively few years can best be realised when we remember that, not so long ago, it was indelicate not merely to show the leg but even to refer to it--at least by its proper English name."][66-67: "Our greater freedom as regards legs has, however, been accompanied by a great intolerance of certain other parts of the body, and a consequent greater disability to use them for purposes of erotic display than existed in [67] some previous periods.  The accentuation of the posterior regions brought about by means of the bustle now appears to us to be at least in very questionable taste, while we now do all we can to make the breasts--for a long time the supreme attraction of the feminine anatomy--as inconspicuous as possible."][67: "Modesty varies of course not only in time but in space.  In parts of Central Africa, the buttocks are the region on which shame is concentrated, a shame which, with the inhabitants of those parts, far exceeds that attaching to the external genital organs.  Our own past sensitiveness to legs was not one that appealed to Moslems, who never tried to disguise from themselves the fact that women, like men, were bipeds.  To them the face was the part of the body that demanded covering--an attitude which, in turn, met with but little understanding from Europeans, among whom the veil has never enjoyed more than a decorative or symbolic significance, and to whom the face, together with the hands, has usually been the region which is freest from the sense of shame."][79: "Furthermore, there would seem to be a correspondence between democratic sentiments, sexual freedom, and the public exhibition of female beauty.  In mohammedan countries, where the sexual freedom of women was reduced to a minimum, women were apt to be carefully concealed from the public gaze, the very sight of their faces being jealously reserved for their husbands.  In Europe, after the French Revolution, when 'liberty, equality, fraternity' was the slogan of the day, women wore the lightest of costumes in the street, where decollete was regarded as no less appropriate than in the ballroom.  In the period of prudishness and of greater social snobbery and differentiation that came later in the nineteenth century, such exposure became reserved for indoor occasions with friends and social equals.  At the present day, when democratic views and greater sexual liberty are once more triumphant, women again unhesitatingly expose a larger portion of their bodies to the general view."][126: "The tendency, so constantly recurring during the last few hundred years, to bare the bosom and some portion of the back and arms, may be said to represent a return to the true spirit of tropical costume."][142-143:"... modern clothes on the whole tend to be less durable than those of many former periods.  By some writers this fact has been brought into connection with the better environmental conditions of modern civilised life, and especially of urban life.  The shoes, for instance, that we can wear in modern towns with their carefully paved streets would have been quite unsuitable for the street conditions that existed in most towns two hundred years ago; we do not need the thick boots that were then the only safe or convenient form of footwear in which to cross the muddy sewers with which the streets of that period abounded."][158: "With the naturalism that followed the French Revolution, the body once more came into its own rights, and the purpose of clothes became the relatively secondary one of throwing into relief the beauties of the body.  Clothing became extremely simple and exiguous (much more so than in recent years), underclothing became almost dispensed with.  A fashionable lady's costume had to pass two tests:  it must not weigh more than ½ lb. in all (as against 2 lb. or more at the present day) and her dress must be of such thinness and flexibility that it could be passed through her wedding ring.  Not content with this, she damped her dress before putting it on, so that it should cling closer to the figure."][161: "Legs have emerged after centuries of shrouding, and adult woman at least frankly admits herself to be a biped.  Indeed, in the last year or two, her ankles, calves, and knees (all the more dazzling in their suddenly revealed beauty after their long sojourn in the dark) have been her chief erotic weapons."][171: "Petticoats have all but disappeared, stockings are perhaps none too safe, the flimsy descendants of the corset are invertebrate degenerates in comparison with their stiff and haughty ancestors, and how puny is the present skirt by the side of its more bulky and imposing predecessors!"][189:"... the defiant use of powder-puff and lipstick is a token at once of triumph and of independence, signaling a victory in the spheres both of sex and of society--a victory over old habits of sexual repression and social subordination.  It is a victorious gesture on the part of women and, like other victorious gestures, not always in the best of taste.  If it is itself in some ways retrograde, it is nevertheless correlated with a great advance in social status and in sexual freedom.  Such a minor evil can well be tolerated and excused for so great a gain.  It is probable, too, that it will not be permanent.  When a conqueror has grown used to the fruits of victory, he has no need of gestures to express his triumph."][193-194: "In practice it seems fairly evident that our principle involves a large further extension of the tendencies towards a greater freedom that have been in evidence of recent years.  We ourselves look back upon certain manifestations of nineteenth-century modesty--such as the inability to mention the word 'leg', the rigorous segregation of the sexes at bathing, the curtained steps of bathing machines (so that the bather might not be seen before she had reached the protecting opaqueness of the water), the monstrously protuberant bathing dresses--with astonishment mingled with disgust; the latter because, at this distance we are able to perceive the erotic obsessiveness of the modesty in question.  Future generations may one day contemplate with similar emotion the fact that we wear bathing dresses at all.  Our principle clearly demands that we [194] should be able to tolerate nakedness here it is obviously called for, as on the bathing beach."]

Goodson, Aileen.  Therapy, Nudity and Joy.  Los Angeles, CA:  Elysium, 1991.  ISBN 1-55599-028-2.  [146-147:  "From ancient through medieval times, sex was accepted as an integral part of life.  Sexual knowledge was gained unobtrusively in the natural manner of other acquired knowledge.  In those eras there was far less personal privacy among all social classes, and it was usual for families to bathe and sleep together in the nude.  There was no embarrassment about the body's elimination or sexual functions.  Most of the population lived 'close to nature,' and children grew up with an early awareness of animal matings and procreation."][155: "Many of us may be unaware that nudity is a normal condition that has prevailed throughout most of mankind's existence.  Anything from complete nakedness to casual body covering was a lifestyle component from prehistoric times through the Greco-Roman civilizations and into part of the Middle Ages."][155: "Even today, in various remote areas of the warmer climes, naked societies persist as primitive tribes whose members do not wear clothes.  These societies point up, among other things, how drastically our attitudes toward nudity and social organization have changed throughout human history.  Unfortunately, modern civilization's puritanical laws of decency have labeled unclothed tropical-zone cultures as offensive and inferior."][156: "The Tupari tribe of the Rio Branco, in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, furnish another example of nude living among aborigines.  Tibor Sekelj, who lived with the Tupari for four months, wrote: 'It is no wonder that the Tupari never created any kind of clothing, for the weather is always warm.  Their natural nudity fits perfectly into the framework of their surroundings and, except for ceremony or decoration, they never think of covering themselves.' "][156-157: "A fascinating tale of early sun worship and nudity was unearthed in 1887 at Tell-el-Amarna, a small Egyptian village on the banks of [157] the Nile some 200 miles south of Cairo.  There, an Arab woman accidentally stumbled upon the baked-clay tablet archives of Pharaoh Akhen-Aton (1385-1353 B.C.).  It was learned through the subsequent translation of these tablets that the brilliant young pharaoh and his exquisitely beautiful queen, Nefertiti, considered the sun, Aton, to be the true wellspring of life and thus justified the practice of nudism for spiritual and physical advancement."][157: "Because of the discovery of these tablets and other artifacts at Tell-el Amarna, the seat of Pharaoh Akhen-Aton's government, it is now well known that he was not only a great religious reformer and mystic, who disputed the pantheism of the traditional priesthood, but also a poet of great sensitivity.  On the scattered stones that had formed the original wall of Aton's Temple, archaeologists have found and deciphered the pharaoh's famous 'Hymn to Aton, the Sun God,' a portion of which appears in the Hebrew scriptures as Psalm 104 of the Old Testament. 'Through this poem,' writes J. Herman in King & Queen of the Sun, 'the pharaoh reveals himself to be a lover of beauty in nature, in art, and in man.' "][157:  "However, some of the archaeologists who unraveled the story of the Sun Pharaoh had difficulty accepting what they found and became highly critical of Akhen-Aton and Nefertiti.  'Brought up in an environment of Victorian and puritanical notions, they condemned these entrancing figures of Egyptian history because they discovered that no only the Pharaoh and his wife but also their children and officials went around with too few clothes (transparent at that!) or no clothes at all, and they practiced nudity in the royal palace, in the royal gardens and swimming pool, that they loved physical beauty, valued good food and win, and led a frankly joyful existence."][158: "While it is known that Akhen-Aton and Nefertiti were not the first Egyptians to luxuriate nude in the sun's rays (a fourteenth century, B.C. carving of a nude Sumerian priest is preserved in the British Museum, and a fifteenth century, B.C. painting of a nude Egyptian girl lutists is found on the wall of a Thebes tomb), he and his alluring consort did have their 'day in the sun,' breathing life into a freshly idealistic concept of community."] [158: "When a Greek wished to dance or work, he simply slipped out of his clothing and proceeded.  It was the natural thing to do, and no one was dismayed by ... seeing a nude person dancing or working.  Archaeologists have found many vases depicting completely naked performers at festivals and laborers in the fields,' writes Anthony J. Papalas in his article, 'Greek Attitudes Toward Nudity.' "][159: "While nudity was so common in early Greek athletics and sculpture that historically it cannot be overlooked, historians tend to downplay or ignore the religious and philosophic foundations for nudism in Greek life.  For example, the Greek gymnasium is rarely presented as a place for general education, which, in fact, it was.  Paul LeValley, in an article appearing in the naturist magazine Clothed with the Sun offers a more accurate picture."][159: " 'The Greeks could think of no higher tribute to their gods than to imitate them--to become as godlike as possible, both mentally and physically.  It was the whole person that mattered: the well-developed mind in the well-developed body.  Apollo, the god of athletics, was also the god of music.  In fact, the athletes trained to music.  The gymnasiums were where philosophers like Socrates hung about.  Almost every major school of Greek philosophy was headquartered in a gymnasium ... As Greek religion declined and was replaced by philosophy, Socrates often advocated nudity as a form of honesty.  It is clear from this that the ancient Greeks sought balance--their goal of The Golden Mean in individual accomplishments as well as in matters of state.' "][159: " 'Beginning with exercises in the nude, a typical day for the Greek student is described by Papalas in the article cited above: "After several hours of activity and instruction about the body, he bathed and went to his classroom--most oven in the nude, for the mild climate of Greece did not require clothing except for some unusually cold days in winter. ... Teachers and scholars attempted to establish an equilibrium between mind and body.  The student, therefore, was required to devote the same amount of effort to physical progress as to mental.' "] [159-160: "Darius, the Persian king, relying on the report of a spy sent to observe Greeks training for battle, mistakenly concluded from their attitude toward nudity and democracy that Greeks were weaklings. [160] The army infiltrator returned to Darius with an account of how the Greeks spent their time prancing around in the nude 'or sitting, partially clothed, listening to idiots propound ridiculous ideas about freedom and equality for the individual citizen.'  Based on this information, Darius expected the Greeks would be an easy target, but his laughter turned to fear and grief when the Persian army was driven out to sea at the Battle of Marathon by well-trained opponents."][160: "Though men of ancient Greece were offered an exceptional training as citizens (with the obvious exception of male slaves), Greek women were denied the high-level education of the gymnasium.  This inequality was speciously justified by reasoning that women had less need for education because they were not permitted to participate in civic affairs along with the men.  Such discrimination, however, diminished with the appearance of a women's rights movement."][160: "Among the gains won by the women of this group was the establishment of female athletic competitions.  During these games, women performed comfortably in the nude, as was the practice of the men.  'The Greek admiration for the human body and the willingness to display it were closely bound up with Greek honesty and intelligence.  No one thought it wrong that young Spartan girls should go naked in public dances and processions.  The young men who gathered to look upon the events displayed no lust or wantonness.  Plutarch (the Greek biographer and historian) wrote that the appearance of these maidens was received with admiration, respect, and shamelessness."][161: "Athletes from Sparta are given historical credit for being the first to discard clothing while in training for competition.  It's possible this occurred as early as the seventh century B.C.  Since these pioneering athletes won an abnormally high proportion of the prizes because their bodies were not restricted by clothing, other Greek athletes began to emulate the nudity of the Spartans.  Thereafter, nudity was an integral part of the Olympic tradition until 393 A.D., when Roman Emperor Theodosius, Christian ruler of Greece, banned the Olympic Games because he considered them to be pagan ceremonies."][161: "It is now known that social nudity in ancient Greece was encouraged by the existence of nudity among the holy men of India.  For example, when Alexander the Great heard reports of nude ascetics in India, he sent Onesicritus, a Greek philosopher, to investigate the gymnosophists (a name given by the Greeks to these naked philosophers).  The findings of Onesicritus must have impressed and intrigued Alexander, for he then traveled to India (in 326 B.C.) to meet with a gymnosophist group, and this meeting then led to other exchanges between the two countries."][161: "Pyrrho of Elis, founder of the philosophy of skepticism, studied with the gymnosophists and, upon returning to Elis, practiced their teachings, including nudism.  Further, when the Greek army was in India, the soldiers participated in numerous religious observances that were accompanied by nude sports activities."][162: "In Alexander's time (356-323 B.C.) there were a number of ascetic sects in India whose members walked about naked as part of their spiritual discipline.  The largest, Ajivikas, demanded complete nudity of its disciples.  This group lasted about two thousand years before completely disappearing."][162: "LeValley further states that 'Mahavira scolded the Greeks, who mostly confined their nudity to the gymnasium, for being less assured than Indian ascetics.  Mahavira often mentioned nudity as a method of becoming free from bonds ... contentment with no clothes ...'  Indians and Greeks both agreed that nakedness represented a state of purity and honesty.' "][163: "During British control of India, the gymnosophist practice of nudism was greatly curtailed.  However, now that there is an independent Republic of India, the Jains are again unhampered in their religious practice of nudity.  In India today, some women have also joined the ranks of the naked Jain ascetics."][164: "Until the twentieth century, the Japanese sense of modesty strongly differed from that of Europe or America.  Nude communal bathing, for example, was a basic fact of daily life until fairly recently and still exists in rural areas that are distance from Japan's westernized major cities."][166: "Originally a Shinto purification rite, the practice of social bathing in the nude spread throughout Japan and became as much as part of Japanese daily life as the rising of the sun.  Shintoism, prior to 1945 the state religion of Japan, emphasizes personal cleanliness, both spiritually and physically."][167: "Therefore, most Japanese men and women have grown up accustomed to being viewed in the nude and to seeing the nudity of others at all ages.  Yet, with the faster pace of life typical of the larger cities in Japan and with the westernization of home architecture, the neighborhood bath house is losing its previous prominence.  The communal, nude thermal springs, however, remain prized vacation spots."][168: "Nudity was a core practice of Witchcraft.  This natural state was considered essential to raising the magical energy between earth and the higher force.  It was a symbol of freedom and openness.  No part of daily life, it was used with reverence in private groups (covens) and in other religious ceremonies an celebrations.  English royalty has been consistently associated with the Wiccas.  William the Conqueror and his son, William Rufus, who succeeded him, for example, are said to have been coven members, as were the Platagenets before them.  The ancient Celtic Druids (now only a tiny sect that performs rituals at Stonehenge in England) were even recognized for a time as practicing the country's official religion."][170: "There are a number of ministers and priest in the contemporary nudist movement.  In fact, the modern nudist movement was largely organized by ordained religious leaders ..."][170: "For example, as the Rev. Martin Wadestone, author of 'Nudism and Christianity,' writes: 'Actually, in the light of the Bible, there is no sin in nudity itself; but if a person uses the nudity for lustful or immoral purposes he has misused it, and this constitutes a sin.  The Bible does not speak against nudity nor does it teach that the body is shameful.  There is reference to shame in nudity, but this shame was produced in the mind of man, not by divine ordination."][170: "This was also the belief of at least five groups in the history of Christianity: the Carpocratians, Adamites, Adamianis, Encratites, and Marcosians.  Most of the historical information we have concerning the beliefs and practices of these early Christians comes ti us, in fact, through the recorded criticisms and diatribes of Roman Catholic Church authorities, since these authorities have largely destroyed the writings of those they considered heretical."][170-171: "Platonic philosopher Carpocrates, born in Alexandria, Egypt in the second century A.D., believed in one God as creator of the world and all things in it.  He combined the Christian ideal of the brotherhood of man with portions of Plato's Republic, advocating that the [171] glories of God should not be hidden.  He urged Christians, both male and female, to look upon the natural body with gratitude for the creative force of God-love.  His disciples suffered ridicule and sometimes severe persecution but continued their practices into the fourth century A.D.  Records indicate that nude statutes and a museum were created to honor this sect.  It was the Carpocratians who first portrayed Christ's body in the exposed form commonly seen to this day."][171: "Some generations later, Encratites and Marcosians, who developed out of the Adamiani tradition, appeared on the scene,  The Ecnratites were vegetarians and many, if not all, practiced nudism.  In ancient Gaul (France), a Gnostic teacher named Marcus and his followers became known as Marcosians and were well established in the Rhone Valley by the third century.  Irenaeus, a conservative Christian writer of the day, criticized their nudity and religious beliefs, remarking: 'Marcus is regarded by these senseless and brain cracked as working miracles.' "][171: "The Adamites (no connection with the Adamianis) were an active sect in Bohemia during the fifteenth century A.D.  They were part of the Hussite Reformation.  This group set up numerous religious nude communities."][172: "Nakedness has been used throughout history as a form of protest as well as an expression of positive human values.  If one's aim is to get noticed, in a clothed society stripping is certainly an effective method of gaining attention.  This was a tactic used by some hippies in the 1960s and also be a number of religious protesters throughout history.  For example, regarding the famous St. Francis of Assisi: 'On being rebuked by his bishop, he snatched off his clothes and walked naked through the streets.' "][172: "... there is no doubt about the Doukhobors of Canada, who left Russian in 1898 and still exist in small colonies to the north of the United States.  An extremist and individualistic sect of anarchists who separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1785, the Doukhobors numbered some 15,000 persons when they first came to Canada.  Calling themselves 'Sons of Freedom,' they were constantly in trouble with the law because of their refusal to conform with Canadian laws governing educational, civic, and cultural standards.  The Doukhobors often protested en masse in the nude.  Their first nude parade was in 1903, and though the demonstrators were prosecuted and jailed, they continued this unique manner of making a statement for several decades."][174: "And a law in effect while New Jersey was still a British colony allotted the same penalty given witches to women: ' ...whether virgins, maids, or widows who shall after this Act, impose upon, seduce, or betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects by virtue of scents, cosmetics, washes, paints, artificial teeth, or high-heeled shoes."][175: "Shame regarding sexual desires and activities reached such extremes that a woman in the mid-1800s minimized and hid all body parts except her face.  She wore layers of petticoats and was enveloped in clothing from high-collared blouse to floor-length bustled skirt, a bonnet completely covering her head and a shawl drawn around the body.  'Even a lady's hands were hidden.  An 1840 Victorian ladies' journal advised that 'Gloves are always graceful for a lady in the house except at meals.'  and some women did not appear at the table 'barehanded.'  They were fingerless mittens."][176: "Nevertheless, the pride of the Victorian husband in having a 'proper' wife was a facade that hid a dark side.  There were more prostitutes per capita roaming the streets of London during this time than at any other period of that city's history.  A flourishing trade in pornography and a profitable trade in virgins existed.  Young girls were abducted: 'The going rate on the clandestine market fluctuated between five and forty Pounds, according to their age and beauty."  After having been disgraced, these girls often joined the ranks of prostitutes."][178: "Perhaps the most cruel and destructive manifestation of Victorianism was the insensitive treatment of native cultures by religious missionaries and European colonists.  With no regard for native pride and dignity, for their religious customs, nor of the practicality of their dress and lifestyle, arrogant Victorianism demanded conformity with European customs.  Forcing clothing on those peoples whose cultures had previously permitted them to experience body freedom was not only demeaning and humiliating but an effective and constant reminder of their 'inferior' heritage and status.  An 1894 report by a former governor of a Tonga village describes these conditions: 'It was punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear native clothing; punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine and imprisonment to wrestle or to play ball; punishable by fine and imprisonment to wrestle or to play ball; punishable not to wear shirt and trousers and, in certain localities, coat and shoes also ...' "][178: " 'Since the natives had never learned to wash or mend clothes, it took them a long time to adapt to European garments, which were at first worn until they fell to pieces.  There was a great decline in cleanliness with resulting skin diseases and other infections ...' "][179: "Benjamin Franklin wrote of his daily ritual, a nude cold-air bath each morning while reading or writing.  Franklin is reported to have been seen swimming the Thames in London without clothing."][187: "Charles Darwin was amazed to find the Patagonians in Tierra del Fuego completely unclothed in the frigid winds of the southern tip of South America, even observing snow melting on their naked bodies.  Others have reported that the tribes of Central Australia used no covering during cold weather other than paint on their bodies.  And, of course, much has been written bout the endurance of North American Indians.  Early travelers recorded observations of Indian braves playing the equivalent of hockey or lacrosse in bitterly cold weather while completely nude."][187: "In 1805, Meriwether Lewis wrote of his surprise at finding Indians living nearly or entirely nude throughout the year in the high altitudes of the Rockies.  It wasn't unusual to find nakedness among the Indians, but to see it in areas where the winds are chilling even in the summer months was a source of surprise to Lewis, who noted in one of the earliest notes in his journal about Indians: 'It seems they are scarcely sicke, despite their constant naked state.' "][187: "However, a possible answer appears in video films made during the 1980s showing Tibetan Buddhist monks using a special tantric meditation they call Tumo Yoga to raise their body temperatures as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in very short periods of time.  It seems, therefore, that we cannot discount reports by Charles Darwin and others that nudity was the natural state of dress among pre-technological societies even in very cold climates."][193: "The Reverend La Rue Watson also commented about the corrosive effect of western civilization on native cultures when he noted that, with many tribes, it was as much the desire of the natives 'to imitate the supposedly superior race, that put clothes on them,' as it was the missionaries' religious pressure or the merchants' desire to sell cloth, 'with the result that they died like flies from respiratory and other diseases.' "][194: "Primitive cultures come to terms with this subject in a much healthier way than we do.  The artist Gauguin observed in his book Noa Noa that the Polynesians were not preoccupied with sex and had a 'natural innocence, a perfect purity' which, he felt, was influenced by their casual acceptance of nudity in daily life.  Primitive societies have moral values, of course, but since they do not associate shame with genitalia, their social signals tend not to concentrate on those areas."][194: "Among the members of the naked Trobriand tribe of New Guinea, for example, a girl would feel total humiliation and shame if she were seen without the adornment traditionally signifying modesty and respectability--a waistband thong with a small triangular seashell pendant hanging from it, reaching down near the navel.  Members of the Amazonian Botucudo tribe of South America would feel embarrassed and undressed without a lip plug, a large round wooden ring worn by both men and women in ear lobs and lower lip, which is their only clothing.  This embarrassed reaction is similar to reports made by clothed visitors to traditional nudist resort where removal of clothing is mandatory.  The clothed visi[195]tors report they felt embarrassed, different from the norm, improperly dressed."][195-196: "At times it was the height of style to emphasize women's breasts with tight corseting that pushed them up and partially out of the dress.  This was common during many eras of the fourteenth to twentieth centuries.  Completely bare breasts were the fashion for a short time during the Directoire period of the eighteenth century.  And there were the contrasting fashions of the brassiered, sometimes padded 'sweater [196] girl' look of the '40s and the 'braless' flower-child look of the '60s.  In Bali, until recently, it was only prostitutes who covered their breasts."][196: "An extreme example of body-shame modesty was reported in an article by Herbert Freed, M.D. that appeared in the journal Sexual Behavior.  Regarding an anthropological study of a small island community named Inis Beag, off the coast of Ireland, Freed says: 'These Irish islanders abhor nudity, so that only the infant has his entire body sponged, while others wash only their faces, necks, and lower arms and legs, and only on Saturday night. ... Their aversion to the sexual symbolism of nudity has cost the lives of Irish seamen who have drowned, carried to their deaths by their heavy clothes, and of sick men who are unwilling to face a nurse because it might mean baring their bodies.  Secrecy surrounds elimination to the extent that even infants are discouraged in evacuating before siblings.  Even breast feeding is rare because of its sexual connotation, as is fondling or kissing."][198: "Women's clothing has been a clear indicator of their secondary and dependent position in various societies.  The requirement that men and women wear different clothing was established in early religious writing.  For example, Moses in Deuteronomy 22:5 states: 'Woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on woman's garment.'  Consequently, women have been required to wear special restrictive clothing that automatically puts them at physical disadvantage when compared to men."][198: "Most obvious is the Muslim attire for women mandated by Islamic law.  Traditional Arab women wear a drab, unornamented, head-to-toe robe with shawls and veils normally hiding even the face.  Although some women reveal their eyes, and the more daring ones even expose a portion of the face from lower forehead to chin, this outfit places women at a disadvantage in terms of freedom of movement.  It is a constant reminder of their secondary place in society.  Arab men, however, are free to wear clothing of their choice, many donning western attire in varieties of color and style."][198: "Men have traditionally worn clothes that gave them mobility and freedom of movement, such as trousers, pleated kilts, or tunics.  On the other hand, women have traditionally worn long skirts that impeded movement, that made running or jumping impossible, that required the use of one or both hands to lift the skirt while accomplishing such ordinary tasks as climbing stairs.  This was an effective means of relegating them to a subsidiary role, especially in the years when tight-laced corsets of bone or metal were the fashion."][198: "In oriental cultures where females wore pantaloons, their movement was impeded by clogs or stilts attached to sandals.  Arabian women wore sandals on stilts fastened to the feet by knobs between the toes.  Sometimes, the fashion was to wear large anklets weighing a pound or more.  In ancient Palestine, women's ankles were connected by chains.  In Africa, the wives of wealthy tribesmen wear heavy iron bracelets on their arms and ankles to this day.  However, the crippling mutilation caused by finding the feet of Chinese women, a practice which lasted until the twentieth century, has to be the very worst example of female subjugation and dependency [199] caused by fashion.  But Chinese men of status wouldn't consider marrying a women without this painful deformity."][199: "In some societies, women could not ride a horse like a man.  The cumbersome clothing forced them to use a sidesaddle.  Consequently, women were prevented from riding with any degree of speed, and they were restricted from roaming very far from home."]

Hochschild, Adam.  "Reporting on the Naked Truth."  Mother Jones, p. 6 (August 1981). [6: "President John Quincy Adams was a cold and haughty man: he was as aloof from reporters as from everyone else.  His chief antagonist in the press was journalist Anne Newport Royall. ... Royall demanded an interview with Adams about the bank, he refused to see her.  But Adams was a man of routine,  a routine his enemy investigated.  Each morning he got up before dawn, walked across the White House lawn to the Potomac River, took off his clothes and swam in the nude.  Then he returned to the White House to have breakfast, read the Bible and run the country.  One morning as Adams got out of the river, he was startled to find Royall, whom a historian describes as a 'rotund, unkempt, gray-haired woman,' casually sitting on top of his pile of clothes.  She refused to budge until he answered some questions about the Bank of the United States.  Adams got back in the river and held what may have been history's first aquatic press conference.  Finally, having gotten the interview she wanted, Royall stood up and let the president have his clothes."] [FYI, compare the daily bath of the Pharaoh in the Nile as the Lord commands Moses to force a hearing with the Pharaoh in RSV Exodus 7:15: "Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water; wait for him by the river's brink ... "]

Hollander, Anne.  "Fashion in Nudity."  Georgia Review, 30.3, 642-702 (1976).  [642:  "Anthropologists and sociologists have demonstrated that those peoples who do not wear garments nevertheless develop habits of self-adornment which seem, like Western clothing, to be necessary signs of full humanity.  They are ways of clothing the human body in some completed concept of itself, without actually concealing any portion of its surface or shape."][643: "A survey of cultures leads to the conclusion that the truly natural state of the adult human is dressed (or decorated), but that his sense of nature demands from him a deep respect for nakedness."][644:  "... the Christian theory that clothing is unnatural or profane in its very nature, the result of man's fall, undoubtedly grew out of the direct experience of the erotic pull of dress--even modest dress.  People's clothes seemed to make their inferred nude bodies seem more, and not less, desirable.  Nakedness, of course, has its own fierce effect on desire: but clothing with nakedness underneath has another, and it is apparently even more potent."][645: "The idealizing function obviously inherent in the serious nude art of a dressed society = to express longings for a primal virtue, a primal human beauty, a primal sexuality--also inevitably produced by a by-product.  This was the costume of nudity itself.  It might be described as a visual extrapolation of the sense of being 'in native honor clad.' "][646: "Without clothes, a group of bodies shows the amazing irregularity of human nakedness, an untidy, unpredictable diversity at odds with the conception of an ideal--even an ideal of variety."][647-648: "Even Giulio Romano's pornographic sedici modi showing various coital positions, so shocking to his contemporaries, have a curiously unsexy look to modern eyes because everyone is [648] wearing the Renaissance figure now associated with idealized formal nudity rather than sex."][654: "In the erotic imagination of Europe, it was apparently impossible until the late seventeenth century for a woman to have too big a stomach.  This has decidedly not been true since then, when breasts and buttocks became (and have remained) far more acutely erotic than bellies."][659: "... the fashionable silhouette was most masterfully reflected in the nude images of the early Rembrandt, whose ladies have the delicate breasts, fat shoulders, huge bellies and general massiveness below the waist that was then so much admired in female bodies."][673-674: "Along with an unprecedented emphasis on the shape of the buttocks swelling out below a tiny waist in both art and dress [in the mid 19th century], there arose a new prurient interest in underpants.  These in fact had not been worn by most women in the Western hemisphere until the middle of the nineteenth century.  Varieties of pants, under or outer, had been worn by men ever since the Nordic and Eastern enemies of Rome had contributed the idea of separately covered legs to a Classically draped civilization; but the separation of women's legs, even by a layer of fabric, was thought [674] for many centuries to be obscene and unholy."] [674:  "In the early Middle Ages, before the first manifestations of strongly expressive European fashion in the fourteenth century, the fact that men wore underpants and women did not was often hidden under the long tunics worn by both.  When men's tunics gradually shortened, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their underpants emerged and were refined into elegant, visible, individual leg-coverings, while women's garments developed even longer and fuller skirts."][674: "The sharpest differentiation made by clothing between the two sexes thus came to be the wearing of pants or skirts, a distinction which gradually came to seem like a law of nature.  Pants were an absolute masculine prerogative, and not to be worn by women even invisibly under a skirt.  Women wore underskirts, and stockings gartered around the knee, but no close coverings over the thighs, belly, or behind.  This was true even in periods when sleeves might be long and tight, necklines fairly high, corseting very tight, and skirts very full."][674: "Throughout the history of the theater, of course, female acrobats and dancers wore underpants while performing.  Such undergarments were a feature of theatrical life that undoubtedly added strength to the association between sexual depravity and the stage in the public imagination.  Once the idea of male sexual definition became attached to the wearing of pants, any hint of this kind of secret transvestism on the part of women became a sign of slight sexual perversion, and consequently not only forbidden but somewhat erotically stimulating.  Certain fast court ladies and courtesans in sixteenth-century Europe had worn rather elegant underpants, not for the comfort but for the thrill."][674-675: "In Paris, the notorious [675] cancan was invented toward the end of the century to cater to this particular prurient interest, and a great deal of semipornographic art was produced showing enormous behinds clad in very elaborate panties.  Suggestive underpants have remained a vulgar erotic preoccupation in modern times, but before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the underdrawers made for women were very simple in cut and modest in trim.  The suggestiveness of black lace, elastic material, or slippery, tight-fitting intimate clothing for the female rear was only conceived at the end of the century and exploited after the First World War."]

Langdon-Davies, John.  Lady Godiva: The Future of Nakedness.  London, England:  Harper & Brothers, 1929.  [7:"... Lady Godiva rode through Coventry naked and probably quite unashamed.  Her husband, who kept his clothes on, was the one who felt shame.  It is vital for the true understanding of the history of future civilization to remember this:  it is a clue to a great deal more of importance to the reader than the reader is likely to suppose."][16: "At Palm Beach the author has seen a millionaire's daughter removed almost forcibly from the seashore because she had attempted to bathe without any stockings on her legs.  Skirts and frills all over were not enough, it would have been dangerous to the onlookers to see a naked calf.  A burly ruffian is kept for this purpose and finds his task a whole-time job: no woman, however wealthy, must endanger Palm Beach by bathing in the sea with bare ankles; and yet there are many who believe that in America money talks.  It does; but there are things that money cannot talk down even when, as at Palm Beach, it uses a megaphone; and one of them is the fear of nakedness even in its most attenuated forms."][24: "Clearly, then the rule of thumb is that any part of the body which is customarily clothed is unmentionable, except in the most general terms, and if our women in England today covered their faces, we should be guilty of immodesty were we to say, 'she has beautiful eyes' or 'a beautiful chin.' "][24-25: "Very fortunately there is a border-line case which corroborates this, namely the female ears.  These in days gone by were as often as not to be found uncovered; but, thanks to recent habits of hair-dressing, they are more and more disappearing from sight and they are no longer quite permissible pegs on which to hang a compliment.  Indeed, these new fashions of hair-dressing by concealing the female ear have produced a very interesting case of what psycho-analysts call 'upward [25] transference,' a symbolic enchantment of their status, and though no man ever felt modest about his, some women experience an exquisite sensation from having their revealed in the process of a lover's caress."][27: "Science, always the destroyer of good breeding, has discovered or rediscovered the uncomfortable fact that nakedness is a medicine for the sick and an inspiration for the healthy ..."][28: "In short, science, the crafty serpent, has begun to tell us that if we want to be healthy we must begin by taking off our clothes; it has actually undertaken, in fact, the rehabilitation of nakedness."][33:"... the real importance for humanity of this new knowledge about nakedness is not that nakedness will make the diseased less diseased, but that it will make the healthy more healthy."][37: "What better epitaph could a simple man require than some such words as these: 'He helped us to take off our clothes'?  And if such an epitaph as this can be honestly earned by him, the writer of this little book at least will be able to die happily."][40: "But if we stare our common fear in the face we find grounds for hope; if we can show that, like so many other human traits, fear of nakedness is not an absolute feeling rooted in the nature of things, but a transient feeling relative to time and space, if we can find that, although our own society and ourselves are engulfed in this fear, other societies have been free from it--then we can hope that our society lit by the light of science and tingling with belief in its own ability to progress higher, may answer the call of reason and burn its clothes.  And we can most assuredly find evidence enough to prove the relativity of the fear of nakedness, it has not always existed; and in human affairs, if that which exists today once did not exist, then it is possible for it to cease to exist once more."][52:"... we can supplement what has already been said in other directions until nobody can possibly imagine any longer that clothes in their first genesis were designed to reduce the passions, but that their object then and now was and is to increase them."][55: "The men of Pongo in northern Nigeria use natural and sometimes manufactured clothing, but they refuse to allow their women to affect any kind of clothing at all, and they give as their reason for this refusal that if the women wore clothes they would become beautiful and be desired by men of foreign villages."][55-56:"... evidence can be rounded off by a quotation from one of the greatest of French novels of manners:  readers of Les Liaisons Dangereuses will remember that the Marquise de Merteuil wrote to the Vicomte de Valmont as follows: 'at least when I was alone with "the faithful servant!" I dressed [56] ... When we reached the Temple of Love, I chose the most seductive dishabille.  It was really delicious; it is my own invention; it lets nothing be seen and yet allows everything to be guessed at.  I promise you a pattern for your Madame de Tourvel when you have rendered her worthy of wearing it.'  Evidently Pongo and Paris are in one mind on the uses of concealment."][60-61: "But we must return to Saul.  The trouble seems to have begun with the habits of his home town, Tarshish, whose ladies excelled all others in the area of their bodies which they contrived to conceal.  They covered every part of their body so securely that not only was the whole of their face and head--not to mention the rest of their bodies--to be guessed at, not seen, but they themselves could see nothing of the outside [61] world but the road on which they trod."][74: "The Jesuit Fathers in South America gave the natives ample dress material to cover everything necessary, but they cut it all up into strips and decorated their heads with it and tied it round their necks; and when asked to wear something lower down they refused point-blank, saying, 'they would be ashamed to do so.'"][76-77: "The result of these efforts to attack nakedness in its primordial home is that clothes, with help from trader's alcohol and European cold and influenza germs, will soon have so depopulated Melanesia that no natives will be left [77] there to convert.  Having no knowledge of hygiene and living in a hot damp climate, they lie down in wet trousers or shirts, because it is Christian to do so, develop bronchitis and die; and of such is the kingdom of heaven."][113-114: "But in spite of those strong confessions of faith in the Sermon on the Mount, history everywhere is stained purple with the blood shed by the armies of the Prince of Peace, ... Fears, therefore, that 'the nudity movement' will destroy Christianity are probably groundless, for Christianity will swallow 'the nudity movement' just as it swallowed war. ... the time will come when every [114] club for the propagation of nakedness will have its chaplain."

To be continued.


    Bibliography:  Abstracts for Legal Defense--Part 3

    We continue with the third installment of Marvin Frandsen's monumental compilation.  The topic is still fashion.

Langner, Lawrence.  The Importance of Wearing Clothes.  Los Angeles, CA:  Elysium Growth Press, 1991.  ISBN #  1-55599-039-8. [39: "Instead of reducing man's sexual desires, it [invention of clothing] actually inflamed them.  Mankind, striving to rise above the call of the flesh, became one of the most erotic of all living creatures because of his clothing."] [39: "This stimulus resides in (a) the curiosity which is aroused by the habitual wearing of clothes which keep the naked body from becoming commonplace, and (b) the erotic impulse which comes into play with the removal of these clothes. ... while primitive naked peoples are just as much interested in sex, they lack the immediate sexual stimulus due to the uncovering of the body."] [41: "among habitually naked primitive peoples, eroticism due to viewing the opposite sex in the nude is less aroused as compared with the sexual stimulus due to the nakedness of people who habitually wear clothes.  For example, the men of Pongo, French West Africa, refused to allow their women to wear any kind of clothes because, if they did, the women would become more beautiful and be desired by the men of other villages.  With some habitually naked tribes, clothes are won on special occasions for the express purpose of provoking sexual excitation, as in sexual rites and dances.  ... The custom of both sexes bathing together in the nude which existed in some parts of Japan, and in nudist colonies in this country and Europe, is not usually accompanied by increased sexual stimulation, but the reverse."] [41: "When primitive peoples are unaccustomed to wearing clothing, putting it on for the first time does not decrease their immorality, as the ladies of missionary society think it will.  It has just the opposite effect.  It draws attention to the body, especially to those parts of it which are covered for the first time."  Quoting Arthur Grimble, Research Commissioner of Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, "Clothes may have originated in the Garden of Eden but they have spoiled a Pacific paradise.  Clothes covering bodies which once went naked, have contributed to the natives' moral decadence by stimulating a nasty curiosity which never before existed."] [51: "Contrary to established beliefs, the differentiation in clothing between men and women arose from the male's desire to assert superiority over the female and to hold her to his service.  This he accomplished through the ages by means of special clothing which hampered or handicapped the female in her movements."] [51-52: "In order to maintain his masculine domination as head of the family and food provider, man invented 'man-clothes' which were the exclusive property of the male sex, gave him complete mobility and made him feel superior to his woman.  He also devised 'woman-clothes' for the female which made it difficult for her to wander far from the camp fire and the children. ... her apparel became a badge of servitude."] [52-53: "How were men able to use clothing to demonstrate the male's superiority over the female, giving him greater mobility while hampering her in her movements?  This was accomplished in Western civilization by providing divided garments such as trousers, knicker-bockers and so forth, or pleated kilts, or tunics, which permitted free movement for the male, while the female was forced to wear hampering skirts and dresses which impeded her movements.  In this way the male covered her and hobbled her at the same time.  Later on he handicapped her still further in other ways, such as by dresses with hampering trains, and by high-heeled shoes which made walking a kind of acrobatic feat."] [53-54: "In the East the sexes often reversed their clothes.  The woman usually wore trousers or pantaloons, but to prevent her free movement, her feet were bound and crippled, as in old China, or her steps were limited by her kimono in Japan, or her ankles were shackled, or her sandals were provided with stilts, or her face and body were heavily veiled, as in Arab countries.  And the main purpose of all these customs and customs was to make it difficult for her to run away.  Thus, by imposing confining garments on woman, or by otherwise hobbling her, man was enabled almost universally to keep her in a state of inferiority and subjugation to him as a personal possession."] [57-59: "If any man reading this feels I have been unfair to his sex regarding the hampering purpose of women's dress, let him essay a little adventure ... Experiment with wearing women's clothes, and see if you do not experience a feeling of embarrassment and restraint.  ... But try to walk freely in the skirt and you will find that each step forward requires you to move a load of the material with your knees.  The skirt also limits your stride and forces you to walk with a shorter step.  You cannot open your knees freely when sitting down, as you are sharply restrained by the width of the skirt. ... But try wearing a very full skirt.  You will experience the feeling of walking around inside a large textile bag or tent.  Your woman friends will tell you that they become used to this, but if they are truthful they will agree that long skirts are not the best garments for working in, or running up and down stairs, or walking in the woods.  Assuredly the skirt is not a very good invention for woman's comfort, but an excellent one for keeping her 'in her place.' ... Male garments may not be 'pretty,' but they do not hamper free movement."] [67: "The first request Joan of Arc made of the Dauphin was that she be permitted to wear male clothing.  She was thus freed from the inhibitions which accompany the wearing of skirts, and ultimately made herself the supreme commander of the French forces."] [73: "In old China, exposure of the upper-class women's tiny feet was regarded as most indecent.  Chinese women's feet were even unmentionable in polite society because they were considered the most sexually stimulating parts of the body."] [73: "In parts of the Dutch East Indies, where women customarily displayed their breasts without the least sense of immodesty, a Dutch governor some years ago ordered the women to cover them on the streets.  The women complied with the law by lifting up their skirts and draping them over their breasts when they saw a Dutch official coming their way, thus displaying an area of nakedness which was considerably more embarrassing to the Dutch."] [76: "Until the 1920's in the Western world, the exposure of women's legs up to the knees was the height of immodesty for literally thousands of years.  Suddenly this taboo went out of fashion and legs came into view without explosive results.  Female legs are now largely uncovered, and the sight of ankles no longer produces violent indignation or shock as in our grandmother's day."] [77: "Our change of attitude towards earlier and stricter rules of modesty in clothing during the past twenty-five years has been largely due to the healthful practice of sun-bathing which has spread all over the United States and elsewhere where the climate permits.  The modern cult of sun-bathing originated in Leysin, Switzerland, where Dr. Charles Rollier effected cures in the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases by subjecting his patients to beneficent doses of the sun's rays."] [78: "Benjamin Franklin stated he was in the habit of rising every morning and reading or writing in his chamber without any clothes on for one half to one hour, according to the season, so as to get the benefit of a cold air bath.  In this practice he was followed by Thoreau."] [81-82: "As compared with normal sun bathers who do not practice nudism, the nudists point to the experience of a French physician, Dr. Lastours, who made extensive experiments in exposing patients--men, women, and children--to the sun for fifteen days entirely naked and for fifteen days wearing drawers of fine white linen.  His records reveal a greater rise in the weight graph and improved morale corresponding to the periods of complete nudity."]  [82-83: "One of the most important arguments in favor of nudism is its value in proper sex education for children.  Dr. H. Forel, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, stated that prudery can be created or cured by education in childhood.  It may be cured by mixed bathing, by accustomizing the child to consider the human body in all parts and functions as something of which one need not be ashamed."]  [83: "It is often assumed that if we lived in a nudist world, our nakedness would produce such excessive sexual stimulation that we would all rush to cover our bodies in order to survive.  Hence the widely held but mistaken belief that the effect of wearing clothes is to inhibit sexual stimulation.  It is now well established that the contrary is true."]  [84: "And since obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, the Pecksniffs in our midst have often hauled the nudists to court for indecent exposure when they should more properly have brought the members of their own congregations to court for indecent thinking, or for wearing clothes which were sexually overstimulating."]  [84: "... in the year 1957 there were approximately 30,000 registered nudists in this country ..."] [89: "The claim that nudist society has no delinquency problem is entirely accurate.  Were we to apply the national average, the nudists would be entitled to no more than three hundred delinquency arrests a year, and still be no worse off than the general public.  The nudist record, however, is much better than that.  As a matter of fact it is near perfect.  A number of nudist juveniles, over the years, have been guilty of such offenses as joy-riding, or petty theft.  The number of these might be two dozen in the past twenty years.  In the matter of sexual delinquency on the other hand, not a single case has ever come to my attention in all my experience, and believe me, I have my ear to the ground."] [177: "In the city of New York, women are not permitted to wear shorts which expose too much of their legs, presumably under Section 1140 of the Penal Law already referred to in connection with 'indecent exposure.' "] [180: "When Directoire skirts and hobble skirts were first worn, police escorts had to be called out.  The same thing happened when girls first wore knickerbockers for cycling, as well as the first time women wore one-piece bathing suits, when the demonstrations were so numerous on the New Jersey coast that special police had to be stationed on the beaches."] [320: "A hotly debated moral issue throughout most of the nineteenth century was whether women had the right to wear any decorative form of underclothes under the traditional plain linen or flannel petticoats.  Attention was specifically directed toward bifurcated undergarments on the lower parts of the female anatomy such as knickers or, later, panties.  With little biblical text to support them, but with much righteous indignation, ecclesiastics and moralists alike condemned such garments as being 'against the laws of God.' " ]  [324: "Immodesty in women's dress was also officially sanctioned in France after the Revolution when the extravagances of the aristocrats of the 1780's were totally abandoned in favor of a very spartan mode of attire that not only displayed the wearers' naked breasts, rouged nipples and bare legs, but also their neatly trimmed and decorated public hair--a mode which has so shocked many costume historians that it has been omitted from most books on the subject."]  [324-325: "Most fashion historians also avoid mentioning many immodest forms of menswear worn during earlier periods, such as that detailed by Chaucer who wrote that many men's garments were 'horribly scanty--too short to cover their shameful members.'  He was, in fact, referring to the continuing fashion for wearing a short tunic, with tight-fitting netherhosen, that was often left unseamed around the underbody line--a fashion first introduced by high-ranking nobles during the reign of Edward IV.  If, however, the aristocratic male genitals of the mid-fourteenth century were not of sufficient size to make a distinguished display, they wore a braquette--an explicit glove-like device made of natural skin-colored leather that was tailored to fit a well-padded penis and scrotum.  To preserve the exclusivity of this form of explicit sexual display, Edward had a law passed in 1348 prohibiting any person under the rank of a lord 'from wearing any gowne, jaket or cloke unless it be of sufficient length on a man standing uprite, to cover his privy member and buttokkes.'"]  [344: "... the very thought of being naked, except in our  most intimate moments, so embarrasses most of us that we still call on our lawmakers to protect us from viewing others in such a state.  We seem to exhibit a phobia about nakedness that was not present in earlier civilizations--a phobia that serves to keep us from accepting ourselves as we really are."]

Levy, Leonard W.  Blasphemy, Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie.  New York:  Knopf Publisher, 1993.  690 pps.  ISBN 0-679-40236-5. [173: "Driven by religious exaltation and devotion to the cross, they [Quakers] reproached other Christians by going naked in public 'for a sign.'  Baxter acknowledged that it was 'a Prophetical act,' but he did not realise its significance.  As Fox told the vicar of Ulverston in 1652, God made a Quaker 'goe naked amongst you a figure of thy nakedness ... before your destruction cometh ... that you might see that your [you're] naked from the truth.'  The Quaker leaders did not reprove the practice, rooted in Isaiah 20:3, for it also showed a central trait of early Quakerism: the denial of self-will or the evidence of humility before the cross."][257: "One woman walked stark naked into a church service, and still another paraded that way in a street in Salem.  Both naked women witnessed to the spiritual nakedness of congregationalism.  Their brutal punishments by the saints of the Bay Colony pass belief."]  [306: "Lord Chief Justice John Holt, the great jurist himself, presided.  After conviction, Read moved in arrest of judgment on the ground that the court had no jurisdiction over a matter that constituted no crime at common law.  Holt sustained him, declaring that the ecclesiastical courts had exclusive jurisdiction.  'If we have no precedent,' he ruled, 'we cannot punish.  Shew me any precedent.'  The parties had disagreed about the meaning of the 1663 case of Sir Charles Sedley, whose outrageous, drunken behavior included 'preaching Blasphemy to the People,' publicly exposing himself, and 'throwing down bottles (pist in) vi et armis [with force and violence] among the people.26'  In response to the crown's argument that Sedley's case provided the necessary precedent for the criminality of obscenity, Justice John Powell said that Read's case 'is for bawdy stuff, that reflects on no person; and a libel must be against some particular person or persons, or against the government.  It is stuff not fit to be mentioned publicly.  If there is no remedy in the Spiritual court, it does not follow there must be a remedy here.  There is no law to punish it.  I wish there were; but we cannot make law.  It indeed tends to the corruption of good manners, but that is not sufficient for us to punish.  As to the case of sir Charles Sedley, there was something more in that case than shewing his naked body in the balcony; for that case was quod vi et armis he pissed down upon the people's heads.27'  Read's case demonstrated that obscenity constituted no crime at common law, and that Sedley's crime consisted in violent behavior rather than obscenity or, for that matter, rather than mere blasphemy."][308: "Not even physical nudity was regarded as obscene until the next century.  Two similar cases show the change in public, or legal, understanding of obscenity.  In 1733, just a few years after the decision in Curll's case a woman was prosecuted for running in public naked to the waist.  Despite the government's reliance on the Sedley and Curll precedents, and the contention that the woman's nudity violated good morals, the indictment was quashed, 'for nothing appears immodest or unlawful.'31  In 1809, however, a man was convicted for bathing nude in public, although the judges discharged him because 'this is the first prosecution of this sort in modern times.'32  "][631: "26: Rex v. Sedley (1663), in State Trials, vol. 16, p. 155."][631: "27. Queen v. Read (1708), Fortescue's Reports 98; reported also in 'Case of Edmund Curll' (1727), State Trials, vol. 17, pp. 155, 157; Holt and Powell at p. 157."][631: "31.  King v. Gallard, Kelynge's English Crown Cases 163 (1733)."][631: "32. Rex v. Cruden, 2 Campbell's Nisi Prius Reports 89 (1809)."]

Harding, Walter.  A Thoreau Handbook.  New York, NY:  Anchor, 1976.  p. 121 [121: Musing at boys bathing in a river, Thoreau wrote in his journal:  "What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his notebook, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties." (Thoreau 92).]

Hollander, Anne.  "Fashion in Nudity."  Georgia Review 30.3, 642-702 (1976).  [Even in the same culture, taboos about what parts of the body could or could not be revealed have changed radically over time.]

Laver, Modesty in Dress, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. [9: Dominant idea that clothing is necessary for reasons of modesty is a cultural assumption.  It is an assumption that is not shared by all cultures, nor by all members of our own culture.][9: "Modesty, in fact, can be quite independent of clothing, for as Havelock Ellis observes, 'many races which go absolutely naked possess a highly developed sense of modesty'.  And Im Thurn, who made a detailed study of the Indians of Guiana, was convinced that modesty is 'in its origins independent of clothing ... Physiological modesty takes precedence of anatomical modesty; and the primary factors of modesty were probably developed long before the discovery of either ornaments or garments.' "] [9: "Even if exposure of part of the body causes shame, it is not always the same part.  European travelers in the Middle East have often noted that an Arab peasant woman caught in the fields without her veil will throw her skirt over her head, thereby exposing what, to the Western mind, is a much more embarrassing part of her anatomy.  In pre-revolutionary China it was considered shameful for a woman to show her foot.  In Japan the same was true of the back of a woman's neck, and in other countries the knees, the navel, the finger tips and other seemingly innocent parts of the female body have been regarded in the same way.  In such a sophisticated society as that of eighteenth-century France, where deep decolletage was allowed, it was considered improper to expose the point of the shoulder."][11: "Some earlier anthropologists were inclined to believe that it was male jealousy which endowed women with clothes.  They pointed out that in some primitive communities it was the married woman who was clothed in order to conceal her body from other men's eyes, the unmarried girl being allowed to run about almost naked.  But this situation does not arise in the stage of savagery, but in the stage of barbarism when woman has become man's property.  The ultimate term of this use of clothing as concealment is reached with the veiled women of Islam."][12: "E.B. Hurlock notes that 'when primitive peoples are unaccustomed to wearing clothing, putting it on for the first time does not decrease their immorality, as the ladies of missionary societies think it will.  It has just the opposite effect.  It draws attention to the body, especially for those parts of it which are covered for the first time.'  Many anthropologists would support this view and would add that, when habitually naked tribes do wear clothes, they do so for the express purpose of increasing sexual stimulation, as in fertility dances and the rites of spring.  But the whole question of 'dressing up to dance' must be left to a later chapter."] [13: "In dealing with modesty, for instance, we often find the same phenomenon evokes both desire and disgust.  When the bikini first appeared on European beaches, it undoubtedly produced erotic emotions in younger men.  Some of the older men and nearly all the older women were disgusted; and their disgust seems to have been quite genuine.  We even hear of people being made 'physically ill' by what seemed to them an excessive amount of bare flesh."][25: "In the early '20's, in the State of Utah, a bill was promoted providing fines and imprisonment for those women who wore on the streets 'skirts higher than three inches above the ankle'.  In Virginia it was proposed to forbid any woman to wear blouses or evening gowns which displayed 'more than three inches of her throat'.  Ohio was even more severe, limiting the decolletage to two inches, and the same State legislature was asked in addition to prevent the sale of any 'garment which unduly displays or accentuates the lines of the female figure' and to prohibit any 'female over fourteen years of age' from wearing 'a skirt which does not reach to the part of the foot known as the instep'."][27: "It is really a rather astonishing fact of social history that all sumptuary laws are always ineffective.  State and Church, and Puritan moralists of all shades of opinion, have tried to control fashion and all their efforts have ended in failure."][28: "Then, in a single generation, everything changed.  In the fourteenth century there was a sudden realization that clothes, instead of mere wrappings, could be used to attract the attention, and influence the choice, of the other sex; and in little more than a decade were invented the three devices on which Fashion has played infinite variations ever since:  tight-lacing, decolletage and striking head-dresses. ... instead of the dress concealing the throat, it was cut away to reveal much of the bosom."][29: "Decolletage, indeed, had been discovered to be the most potent weapon in the feminine armory and it can be plainly seen where here one would least expect it:  on a sepulchral monument.  In actual life, as we know from contemporary records, it was carried to much more daring lengths, sometimes involving the complete exposure of the breasts.  Even when only the neck and throat were exposed, this was so daring a departure from the doctrine of modesty which the Church had so long imposed, that it could only mean that a new spirit was in the air.  Decolletage is as much a sign of the first dawn of the Renaissance as the novels of Boccaccio.  Life was opening like a flower, and clothes were responding with a symbolic gesture, as they always do."][39: "Curiously enough, the eighteenth century was prudish about shoulders.  The corsage might be cut so low that it was hardly decent without a fichu, but no respectable woman ever appeared in public with the point of the shoulder exposed."][39: "Legs had a short outing in the 1830s to vanish again in the '40s, when it became improper even to refer to them.  On the other hand, early Victorian modes, which gave a general impression of prudishness, allowed a straight-across decolletage for evening which would have been considered highly improper in the eighteenth century."][40: "All this, however, was nothing to the horror evoked by the post-war styles of the '20s.  Women were showing their legs, and it was not a mere matter of glimpsing an ankle but of being presented with the spectacle of knees.  The present age, which has pushed the hem-line even higher, finds it difficult to understand the excitement this caused.  Nothing like it had ever been seen before in the whole history of civilized costume.  Certainly if any woman had walked out into the street in 1915 in the clothes of 1925 she would have been arrested for indecent exposure.  Even in the '20's the  new 'immoral' fashions were fiercely denounced, but women continued to wear them.  And then, in 1930, legs suddenly became a bore.  As the psychologists say, they had 'exhausted their erotic capital', and the emphasis shifted to the back of the dress, or rather to what would have been the back of the dress if it had not been 'backless'."]  [40: "Having lived through these changes, the present author endeavored, in the late '30s, to draw up a chart.  This laid it down that the same dress is indecent ten years before its time, daring one year before its time, chic (chic being defined as contemporary seductiveness) in its time, dowdy three years after its time, hideous twenty years after its time, amusing thirty years after its time, romantic a hundred years after its time and beautiful a hundred and fifty years after its time."][79: "In the earliest civilization of which detailed records have come down to us--the Egyptian--servants seem to have worn no clothes at all, or very few.  In the wall paintings the female slaves whoare tending the guests at a banquet are wearing a decorded girdle resting loosely on the hips.  Male attendants are provided with a thin loin-cloth and sometimes not even that.  The wearing of clothes at that epoch was itself a class distinction."][96: "If we accept the theory of the Shifting Erogenous Zone we must admit that nearly all women's clothes are an exploitation of immodesty."][97: "Fashion really begins with the discovery in the fourteenth century that clothes could be used as a compromise between exhibitionism and modesty.  The aim of fashion ever since has been the exposure of, or the emphasis upon, the various portions of the female body taken in series."][97: "the main fact that emerges from the experience of nudists in modern times is that while the imaginative contemplation of the naked body may be a highly erotic proceeding, the actual experience is exactly the reverse.  It is not a matter of beauty or ugliness, but simply that the eye becomes so accustomed to the naked human body that this ceases to have any meaning to the imagination at all.  Since the relaxation of prudery during the last twenty years or so, even the costumes of the lighter stage have exhibited the same law; in fact, men have become so used to seeing certain parts of the female body exposed that they no longer get any excitement out of the spectacle at all.  In 1900 old gentlemen used to faint with emotion when they caught a passing glimpse of a female ankle.  The modern young man can contemplate without emotion the entire area of the female leg and a considerable portion of the female stomach.  In the 1920s for the first time for many hundreds of years, the female leg was exposed to general view ..."][97: "In short, the female body consists of a series of sterilised zones, which are those exposed by the fashion which is just going out, and an erogenous zone, which will be the point of interest for the fashion which is just coming in.  This erogenous zone is always shifting and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever actually catching it up.  It is obvious that if you really catch it up you are immediately arrested for indecent exposure.  If you almost catch it up you are celebrated as a leader of fashion.  The fashion that is coming in is always rather daring, the fashion which is going out is always rather dowdy, that is, it has exhausted its accumulation of erotic capital."][97-98: "In very primitive times erotic appeal was established by putting on clothes but, as son as it became [97] the general custom habitually to cover the greater part of the female body, the removal of certain parts of the costume could be used as a sexual stimulant."][128: "In primitive communities, of course, the question does not arise:  children are left to run about naked until the age of puberty.  Indeed, the attitude of all savage societies to children was permissive in the extreme.  They were never beaten; and missionaries have sometimes in the past found themselves in considerable danger from the adult members of the tribe when they have presumed to 'correct' the pupils in their schools by methods accepted without question at Eton and Harrow."][129-130: "The Ancient Egyptians had reached a high stage of culture and may have had their own ideas about what was 'not nice'.  But nudity was certainly not included; for when we look at Egyptian wall-paintings we can see that not only the servants but the young princesses wore no clothes at all.  The Ancient Greeks had a similar attitude, for although boys and girls were provided with simple garments, they invariably took them off [130] when exercising in the gymnasium.  After all, that is what the word 'gymnasium' means.  The Greeks had no horror of the body.  Such horror seems to have been a Semite peculiarity, for the young in Assyrian bas-reliefs are almost as much bedizened with fringed shawls as their elders."][130: "When the greater part of the world reverted to barbarism, the children of peasants were once more free to run about naked.  They probably did so in this country at least into Anglo-Saxon times ..."][145: "The history of bathing costumes is very curious, for, after all, the only sensible costume for bathing in is no costume at all.  The Greeks and Romans would have thought it madness to put on clothes in order to get them wet.  In the Middle Ages both sexes bathed together naked in the bath houses in spite of the strictness of the Church, which regarded such institutions as little better than brothels."][146: "In the late eighteenth century people began to bathe in the sea: a 'watering place' ceased to be a town like Bath and became a town like Brighton.  At first sexes were segregated and bathed naked, as can be seen from some of the caricatures of Rowlandson, but the practice was less startling than it might seem because of the bathing machines which were provided with an umbrella-like awning.  This made it possible to descend into the water without being seen.  Men long continued to bath naked, but women began to be provided in the early years of Victoria's reign with a kind of ample poncho with a hole in the middle, or a large cloak tied round the neck.  This spread out on the surface of the water to a considerable distance, leaving the limbs at liberty beneath."][160-161: "What might be called secular nudism, on the other hand, has shown a startling expansion in the last half century.  Beginning in Germany before the advent of Hitler, the cult spread rapidly all over Europe.  At the present day it is estimated that a quarter of a million Germans practice nudism with the approval, or at least with the permission, of the authorities.  There are even public nudist beaches, notably that at Absersiwien, on the island of Sylt, near the Danish-German frontier.  France has its famous Ile de Levant, near Toulon.  In England there are said to be fifty clubs catering for ten thousand nudists; and in America there are approximately thirty thousand registered nudists.  There are even Naturist conventions, sun-bathing queens and nudist marriages.  Sometimes there is trouble with the local authorities, but the United States courts have, on the whole, upheld private nudist camps and nudist magazines.  Those who have visited such camps have been unanimous in their verdict that they are well conducted and give no cause for scandal of any kind.  So we arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that the only way in which we can be cleansed of the Pride of Life and (almost) cleansed of the Lust of the Eye, is to wear no clothes at all."]

"Politicians, Corporate Executives Already Live in a Clothes-Optional World."  Clothed with the Sun 2.2, 6 (1982).  [Senator Edward Kennedy has been photographed skinnydipping at public beaches in Florida.  At the White House of his brother, John F. Kennedy, nudity had been common around the White House pool.]

Renbourn, E.T.  Materials and Clothing in Health and Disease: History, Physiology and Hygiene.  London: H. K. Lewis & Co. Ltd., 1982.  British Standard Book No. 0 7186 0377 X. [473: "Nudity is the garb of primitive man in the tropics and may be accepted in spite of desert heat or mild near-zero cold.  In the early Christian church, nudity was accepted as being proper for baptism.  With the naturist, nudity is a means of escaping from self-consciousness and obtaining stimulation by the elements of sun and moving air."][478:" Women in general are unsafe to men, and amongst primitives there is a widespread tabu of the sexes eating together.  A similar fear may explain separation of the sexes at menstruation and birth.  There are even tabu states associated with sexual intercourse.  Women may transmit the dangerous state through any form of clothing.  In the villages of Cambodia, a wife may not use the pillow or mattress of her husband.  It is considered unlucky in the villages of Thailand for a man to pass under a woman's clothing hung out to dry.  The bed is seldom shared amongst certain natives of East Africa.  This is due to the fact that the breath of the wife may damage the health of the husband.  In the Marquesas Islands the use of canoes is prohibited to the female sex by tabu.  Tapa-making, however, belongs exclusively to women and it is tabu for the men to touch it.  In Samoa the manufacture of cloth was allowed only to the men.  The Abyssinian man is not allowed to do the shopping but is responsible for washing the clothes of both sexes and the woman is not allowed to help.  In Borneo it was believed that simply to stand on an article of clothing worn by a woman made the man weak and useless for hunting, fishing and war.  The Basuto women are subject to witchcraft and wear aprons for protection.  In fact, the wearing of coverings for the genitals and even the buttocks is in no way related to hygiene or modesty but acts as protection against the entry of dangerous, magical spirits which may impair fertility.  As mentioned earlier, this may have been the purpose of the primitive hip girdle from which protective shells or aprons could be suspended.  In some parts of Africa, women wear not a genital curtain but one over the buttocks.  In a number of figurines of prehistoric Venus, one may find a similar buttock curtain with no obvious cover in front.  In certain parts of the world, primitive natives wear a shell over the prepuce of the penis as a form of magical protection, the rest of the genitals being unashamedly uncovered.  In the New Hebrides the men adopt the closest secrecy with regard to the penis.  The is not due to any sense of modesty but [479] to avoid 'narak', the sight of a penis, even that of another man being considered highly dangerous.  For this reason the organ is wrapped around with many yards of cloth, winding and folding it until an absurd bundle almost two feet in length is produced.  Yet the testicles are free to the open air and insects."][483: "It is often assumed that modesty in clothing, as practised in Europe, arose from the teachings of the Hebrew prophets or the early Church Fathers.  However, it is certain that in the first few centuries of the Christian era nudity was accepted as not necessarily being sinful, and baptism in the nude was frequently carried out in the rivers of Europe.  If the Church Fathers insisted on the sinfulness of cleanliness, of public baths and nudity, this certainly, in the early days, was related to the sexual excesses of the dying Roman Empire."][485: "Nudity as already noted was not unduly frowned upon by the early Christian Church but when the public was forbidden to visit the open baths, religious nudity, behind the scenes, was continued by such sects as the Adamites, Turlupins and the Flagellants.  Much earlier, nudity was practised by the Essenes.  This practice of nudity was linked to the idea that if the nude body was not sinful before the fall of Eden, then one might be closer to God appearing before Him as one was born.  Although the Muslims deemed it a sin to be in the nude, the final circumbalation of the Ka'Bala, the most holy place at Mecca, was formerly carried out, like early Christian baptism, in the nude."][498: "The attitude of prehistoric man to the body of his women is of course not known, but his cave paintings show that he was, at least, interested and understood her anatomy.  To some extent this seems true of primitive man today who, strangely enough, does not appear to have the same intense erotic interest in the female body as is found in civilized people.  As far as can be made out, primitive man is not particularly enamoured of the hemispherical breast so beloved of man throughout the whole of civilized existence.  If anything, primitive man seems to have a penchant for the dropping breasts which, in his women, are common after breast feeding numerous infants up to the second or third year of life or later."][498-499: "The female breast in Europe was sometimes completely bare as typically seen in primitive people until the advent of the missionary.  Bare breasts, however, sometimes appeared in classical periods.  The Ancient Egyptians loved the female breast, partly for its beauty and partly as a symbol of fertility.  This may explain the large pendant breasts seen in figurines of primitive Venus or the 'earth goddess'.  At the festival of Hathor, the cow-headed goddess, the breasts of the Egyptian priestesses were bared to the worshipers.  Throughout civilized times the breast or nipples have been  [499] painted red or covered with gold as an erotic device.  It is however not generally known that, behind the scenes, nipple rings 'anneax de sein' have occasionally been in fashion even up to the end of the last century."][499: "Although till recently the female breast in primitive races was free for all to view, the Naga women of Assam formerly covered the breast and left the rest of the body quite nude.  When asked for an explanation, one was told that it was stupid to cover those parts--the genitals--that were seen by everybody from babyhood onwards.  Since, on the other hand, the breast of the mature woman was something fairly new, it should of course be covered from prying eyes."][500: "It has been often suggested that the primitive savage does not understand sexual modesty.  However, all who have studied him intimately agree that sexual modesty may be well marked even if the clothing cover is negligible or completely absent."][507: "In the early days of the Church, nudity was accepted as symbolizing purity of the period before the advent of the serpent.  Baptism was not infrequently carried out in the nude. ... The Church accepted nudity in art in order to denote the symbolism of purity, pain and humiliation."][507-508: "In spite of the climate of Europe, nudity was fairly widespread amongst the Ancient Britons and other people of Northern Europe.  Even during the 17th century and later, travelers such as Coryat and Fynes Moryson found the Irish people content to live in the nude or semi-nude indoors.  The women were [508] sometimes asked to reveal themselves for the important visitor.  Strangely enough this custom of nudity in Northern Europe has remained to the present time as seen in the mixed, nude bathing of Russia and the Scandinavian countries."][517: "In the earlier centuries the breasts were sometimes completely exposed; in Victorian times a good deal of 'cleavage' of the bosom was accepted."][531: "The Japanese accept the sight of nude men and women in the public bath as a matter of course but are shocked by the 'topless' line and the 'see-through' dress."][532: "Throughout the ages the sophisticated harlot did not entice by nudity but by a delicate and judicious exposure of the body, mainly hidden by clothing."][542: "Figure 28.1.  Topless Line or See-Through Blouse?  Celestial beings:  Apsarus and servants, from the frescoes in a gallery in the rock-citadel of Sigiriya, Ceylon, end of 5th century A.D.  It is not clear whether the women are wearing 'see-through' blouses which were used at this period.  Similar wall paintings are seen in the caves of Ajunta in India."][543: "On the other hand the 'topless line' with exposed breasts was first seen in Minoan Crete, appeared occasionally during the 15th to the 18th centuries ..."][543: "We have already noted the 'see-through' blouses of the 5c A.D. Ceylon.  The fashion reappeared in the 'Empire Look' at the turn of the last century as has been seen periodically during the fashion parades of the 1960s.  One can thus hardly ascribe exposure or semi-exposure of the woman's body to the contraceptive pill of the present decade."][543: "We might mention in passing that the mini-skirt is nothing new for men, for it was common in men of Ancient Egypt, where it was seen as a sort of short skirt or loin-cloth, and later became the normal wear of Greek and Roman men during exercise or sport.  Greek and Roman soldiers, with few exceptions, always wore the skirt.  We may thus say that even the mini-skirt has been stolen from the male sex."][555: "With the advent of the white missionary, the Polynesian women were urged to cover their nudity with a loose dress which became known as the Mother Hubbard.  At first unpopular, this became changed from a monochrome cotton to a flowered design fabric with the addition of ruffles and pleats.  Today it is called the 'Moomoo' in the Hawaiian islands and has become the national costume.  American tourists often take this costume home, not realizing that it is normally imported from Connecticut."

Ribeiro, Aileen.  Dress and Morality.  New York:  Holmes and Meier, 1986.  ISBN 0-8419-1091-X.  [20: "In Sparta, for example, many were startled by the revealing dress of the Spartan women, known as the 'hip-showing ones' (their austere Doric peplos was open at the side), and even more so at their love of stripping off for wrestling."][20: Although by the seventh century B.C., nude athletics were common in Athens, women did not take part, and thus the Spartan women were regarded as unique; Plato, however, proposed in his Republic that Greek women should exercise in the nude."][21: "War with Persia, the ordeal which matured Greek civilization, also helped to introduce eastern clothing, tighter-fitting and more complex in cut.  Not for the first time in the history of dress, the east was attacked by contemporaries for inspiring decadent, luxurious clothing, which included tailored and fitted garments like trousers and sleeves, and even decorated silk garments all of which was quite unlike the original Greek purity in dress.  Even those who wore Ionian dress could be called unpatriotic, as the Ionian Greeks were allied to Persia, and Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War tells us that by the middle of the fifth century, some women were returning to 'simple woollen garments in the Dorian style.'  Many conservative Greeks regarded wrapping up the limbs in Ionian dress 'as a vile innovation, tending to luxury and lasciviousness.' "][22: "Writing his satires in the early second century A.D., Juvenal (about whom we know very little) harks back to what he considers to be the moral and thrifty past of the early Republic.  He attacks philosophers for their homosexuality, and ultra-fashionable lawyers whose dress verges on the effeminate: 'But where will men draw the limit When they see a high-born advocate dress in transparent chiffon To prosecute loose-living women.'  Such men he later describes as 'walking transparencies', the implication being that they are wearing see-through silk garments."][22: "Although as early as the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great had introduced long sleeves from Persian dress, they were for many hundreds of years regarded as effeminate.  Suetonius delicately hints at Julius Caesar's homosexuality, or at least his over-dandified appearance, as he wore wrist-length sleeves to his tunic.  Not until the end of the second century A.D., with the Emperor Commodus (180-193) was the sleeved tunic acceptable."][45: "... one French chronicler attributing the defeat of his countrymen at the battle of Crecy (1346) to their pride in the latest fashions which God punished.  Not only did they wear gowns gathered or pleated at the sides--'fronciees sur les rains comme femmes', but their tunics were so short that they revealed their genitals, especially when bending down before their lords:"][47: "The devil also features in a story demonstrating the wickedness of cosmetics, a crime far worse than committing adultery.  A knight saw in a dream his deceased wife suffering torments in hell because in life she had plucked her eyebrows, and the hair on the top of her forehead, 'to make her selff the fayrer to the plesinge of the worlde'.  For every hair she had plucked out, the devil thrust a burning awl or needle into her brain, while another devil smeared her face with hot pitch, oil and tar because she had 'peinted her visage.' "][47: "... the enchantress in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1370) tries, unsuccessfully, to tempt the hero not just with her best clothes and jewels, but with 'hir brest bare bifore, and behinde eke', and the French poet Eustache Deschamps in the 1380s believed that such low necklines drove many men to think of rape."][47: "By the end of the century, the short tight tunics worn by men and attacked for many years by the moralists had reached their limits of brevity.  Hose with separate legs and tying with laces to the waist gave way to an all-in-one garment like our modern tights."][52: {In the late 14th century}"Women's gowns became increasingly tight-fitted over the bust, some gowns with front openings even revealing the nipples, and the waist was emphasized by a wide belt with decorative jeweled buckle."][80: {In the early 1600s}"Not only did Anne of Denmark like fast farthingales, but she was inordinately prod of her white bosom which was revealed in the low-cut gowns worn at court.  The Venetian ambassador, in a famous dispatch in 1617, described the queen as wearing a farthingale four feet in width under a dress which displayed her bosom 'bare down to the pit of the stomach'; it was the fashion, he says, generally for 'the plump and bosom (to) display their bosoms very liberally', and it may be a reference to this propensity that is meant when he states that English women dress 'so well and lasciviously as to defy exaggeration'."][80: "Thomas Tuke in his A Treatise Against Painting (1616) denounces women for their breasts 'layd forth to mens view', and for this use of cosmetics; cochineal reddens the nipples and blue veins are painted to emphasize the white skin of the bosom.  The burden of his tract is that women spend more time 'in powdring, pranking and painting, than praying.' "] [82: "There is an early reference to this fashion in Taylor's A Glasse for Gentlewomen to dresse themselves by (1624) where he attacks women for baring 'their armes beyond that which is fit for every one to behold'.  This seems a surprising and unwarranted attack until it is realized that, although women had often worn very tight sleeves, their arms had not been revealed, in public at least, since classical antiquity; the bare arm was to the 1630s what the ankle was to the Victorians."][82:  "Other ways in which women could tempt men, were by revealing as much of their breasts as possible, a fashion which remained popular throughout the seventeenth century, even during the Interregnum.  The breast was either pushed up by boned stays, or revealed in deshabille.   Brathwait exhorted women to 'eye those rising mounts, your displayed breasts, with what shamelesse art they wooe the shamefaste passenger ...'  This had obviously no effect, for a number of tracts published during Puritan rule continued to denounce low necklines which revealed the bosom.  'This laying out of naked Breasts, is a temptation to sinne, both in the Actor and the vaine Spectator', stated one author in 1654; 'those who have their garments made on such a fashion, that their necks and breasts are in great part left naked' ... 'invite customers, by setting open their shop windows.'  The treatise quoted from, Divers Reasons and Arguments Against Painting, Spots, naked Backs, Breasts, Arms &c, was in the main an attack on beauty spots, tiny black velvet spots in the shapes of stars, hearts, etc. which fashionable women placed on their faces and breasts ..."] [118: "One example, from the Lady's Magazine for 1794, will suffice; a young man walking one evening in the Strand accosted a girl he thought was a prostitute, for she was 'dressed in an elegant white muslin gown, (with) to all appearance ... no stays, was far gone with child and with her breasts fully exposed to view'.  Being sharply rebuffed, he was chagrined to discover the next day that the 'prostitute' was the girl it was arranged he should marry."][129: "One of the main complaints about women's dress was our old friend the extreme decolletage; it was indeed a paradox that although women dressed during the day with a high-necked gown, in the evening low-cut frocks were worn.  The Young Lady's Friend (1845) warned against the moral dangers of this custom:  'No woman can strip her arms to her shoulders and show her back and bosom without injuring her mind, and losing some of her refinement; if such would consult their brothers, they would tell them how men regard it.' "][134: {end of 1850s} "Whereas mixed bathing as the custom on the continent, in England the sexes bathed separately, for men bathed naked.  One unfortunate Frenchman, bathing a l'anglaise at Brighton, found that the sea had receded between him and his cabin, and right in his path were three ladies; unable even to find some seaweed to cover himself with, he had to walk the gauntlet, finding out later that the ladies 'disapproved of bathing on Sundays, and had adopted that unexpected method of discouraging Sabbath-breakers.' "][134: "By the mid 1860s, women generally had adopted bifurcated bathing costumes, either made in one piece or consisting of a blouse and knickerbockers, but it was not a universal practice for men to wear bathing costumes until the Edwardian period."][139-141: "In The Lady's Newspaper (1863) one 'J.M.' advocated a dress consisting of loose 'Mamlouk' trousers and a knee-length tunic (it sounds rather like the Bloomer dress), which, it was claimed, would be more modest and less cumbersome than the crinoline, and would make a trip in an omnibus less of a public ordeal.  This suggestion was [140] speedily opposed by 'A.H.T.' who listed all the reasons why such a dress would be unsuitable; the climate was too cold, the costume would be the first step on the road to 'oriental manners' (such as the harem) and if worn in public such an outfit would be 'a source of anarchy and [141] confusion'. "][150: {early 1900s} "Lucile designed dresses where the skirts were draped to reveal the lower leg, but modest women were warned that although they might be tempted 'by the wild tendencies of the moment', they should keep on at least one petticoat."][150: "Equally startling to those brought up on late Victorian and Edwardian strictures with regard to the covering of the neck in the daytime, was the introduction of a modest V-shaped neckline c. 1913.  Denounced by doctors as the 'pneumonia neckline', it joined the list of 'immoral' fashions, such as thin blouses and short skirts, which some Catholic clergymen saw fit to attack.  The Bishop of Laibach's pastoral letter of January 1913 stated that: 'The newest fashions in clothes are designed to serve the cause of lust.  They are sad evidence of the moral depth to which the modern spirit has fallen and at the same time a still sadder proof of the power and tyranny of the mode, before which women and girls ... bow the knee.' "][154: {1922} "... the Trix sisters appearing at the Ritz startled their audience with a sight of their beige stockings, 'and a number of elderly ladies felt that the country had taken another step towards the Pit'.  Never before had female limbs been so openly displayed ... furthermore, said one commentator, 'No nice girl in pre-war days crossed her legs in public.  No nice girl lifted her hands to rearrange her hair in public, for the pull of the arm brought the pectoral muscles into play and featured the breasts; that indicated a mind offering a body.' "][156-157: "Not until the later 1920s did the vogue for sun-[157]bathing--helped by the knowledge that the production of vitamin D was encouraged by sunlight--dispel the use of heavy, artificial make-up.  By the end of the decade, so important a market was being opened up by mass holidays at sea-side resorts, that many designers turned their attention to bathing-costumes which became short and tight-fitting to the figure."][157: "... a Mr T.I.W. (who describes  himself as 'a Christian Business Man'), entitled Modest Apparel.  An Earnest Word to Christian Women (1931).  The author, who is particularly incensed by 'women in bathing attire [who] pose in immodest or indecent positions for the photographer', and by those who wear sleeveless short dresses and even shorts, and waited in vain for 'some godly sister in Christ' to condemn this 'dressing like harlots'--but in vain."][157: "Where one man sees 'nudity' in dress, another man sees freedom, and many men by the end of the 1920s were beginning to envy women for their liberty of movement and relative freedom from convention which they saw in the wide variety of costume at their disposal."][158: {early 1930s} "Another campaign which they waged was to encourage sea-side resorts to allow men to wear bathing slips, i.e. trunks, instead of the bathing costume which covered the chest as well.  Most resorts had, by the outbreak of the First World War, accepted that mixed bathing was here to stay, but many--at least half those questioned by the MDRP in 1930--regarded the slip as 'indecent exposure of the person'.  Gradually, however, during the 1930s, bathing trunks were accepted for men, rather more due to a disregard of local bye-laws than to any pressure exerted by the men's dress reform movement.  It was a very slow and painful process for men to reveal that they had bodies beneath their heavy, constricting suits; it was even more of a break with the Victorian and Edwardian past to begin to think of wearing brightly coloured clothes, and even to adopt elements of women's dress--the latter is a battle still to be won if men wish it."][159: "Typical quotations from the fashion magazines are: 'In the evening you can show everything except ankles' (1933), 'Nudity is the new hue and cry in fashions' (1934) and "Bare your bosom as low as your figure will allow and your conscience will permit' (1935)."][160: {since the end of the 1920s} "Sport, most of all, coupled with a growing health and body cult, helped to break down old-fashioned conventions regarding exposure of the body.  When semi-nudity was the rule at revues and bare limbs an everyday sight in the streets, the public was no longer easily shocked at bare flesh."][163-164: "An overt display of feminine charms, whether by firmly cantilevered bras, or by revealing bathing costumes and sun dresses, aroused some criticism by the clergy during the 1950s.  Two-piece swimming costumes had been seen on the beaches as early as the late 1920; by the early 1950s such bathing suits were quite cut-away and often made of new synthetic stretch fabrics which emphasized the figure--they were given the name 'bikini' after an atoll in the central Pacific where U.S. atom tests took place.  Some sea-side authorities made half-hearted [164] attempts to ban the bikini, but to no effect, and it ruled supreme throughout the 1960s and 1970s."][183 fn53: "Until that time, men could often bathe naked, although by the late 1890s a number of local authorities had begun to put up notices enjoining the wearing of drawers.  Gwen Raveret remembered in her Cambridge childhood (she was born in 1885) that ladies being rowed on the river when passing men's bathing sites, unfurled their parasols and gazed into them 'until the crises was past, and the river was decent again'."]

Robinson, Julian.  Body Packaging:  A Guide to Human Sexual Display.  Los Angeles:  Elysium Growth, 1988.  ISBN 1-555-99027-4.  [17: "Cultural attitudes towards clothing and body decoration differ widely throughout the world with the younger members of each community learning to accept the styles which are traditional within their cultural group as being quite normal, rational and natural."][19: "Thus it can be fairly argued that our current modesty about our bodies is the result and not the cause of our present mode of dressing.  Given a more open and understanding cultural education, the embarrassment we now feel about displaying our naked bodies would soon disappear."][20: "The overwhelming majority of people throughout the world, even those living in the most remote areas, would appear to share a predisposition for adorning and decorating their bodies.  This indicates that the desire to package and present our bodies attractively is an established human trait."][22-23: "Similarly the early Egyptians, who settled along the fertile banks of the Nile, used clothing to distinguish their leading citizens from the mass of the population.  We learn from their detailed hieroglyphics that, although the vast majority of people were either naked or wore [23] only the most meagre covering, the majority of wealthy Egyptians wore an oblong piece of plain cloth called a haik which was draped around the wearer's head and body, primarily as a sign of social status."][22: "Ancient Egyptian royalty wore clothing of transparent silk to signal their high status whilst concubines, musicians and dancers glorified in their near-nakedness."][28: "Apart from enjoying the authority of biblical tradition, few authorities on matters of dress support the notion that modesty is an any way connected with the origins of clothing.  On the contrary, most ancient cultures accepted nudity as a normal part of everyday life."] [28: "In ancient Greece nakedness was openly accepted, particularly when dancing or performing gymnastic feats.  Plato, in The Republic, approved of such customs.  He advocated the free association of naked boys and girls in part to blunt the edge of normal pubescent sexual appetites."][29: "Despite the fact that these early Christians had found so many of Plato's opinions congenial, they would have nothing to do with his liberal views on nakedness.  As Havelock Ellis clearly puts it:  'they failed to recognize its psychological correctness.  The reason was simple, and indeed simple-minded.  The Church was passionately eager to fight against what it called 'the flesh' and thus fell into the error of confusing the subjective question of sexual desire with the objective spectacle of the naked form.  'The flesh' is evil; therefore, 'the flesh' must be hidden.  And they hid it, without understanding that in so doing they had not suppressed the craving for the human form but, on the contrary, had heightened it by imparting to it the additional fascination of a forbidden mystery.' "][41: "The female ear was at one stage considered to be an outrageously erotic echo of female genitals that every right-thinking woman should hide from view."][48: "It is possible to see how the socially imposed rules of modesty based on this theory ['changing erogenous zone theory'] have varied greatly from one era to the next.  The basic principal of 80% concealment, leaving 20% revealed, has remained fairly constant up to the present century."][50: "The high ranking nobles of Edward IV's court for instance, were permitted to display their naked genitals below a newly-introduced shortened tunic (their tightly fitting nether-hosen were still left unseamed around the underbody line).  If their genitals were not of sufficient size to make a distinguished display, they wore a braquette--an explicit glove-like device made of natural skin-coloured leather that was tailored to fit the well-padded penis and scrotum of the wearer.  To preserve this form of explicit sexual display, Edward had a law passed in 1348 prohibiting 'any knight under the rank of a lord, or any other person " from wearing any gowne, jaket or cloke unless it be of sufficient length on a man standing upright to cover his privy member and buttokkes."  The high-ranking nobles could, of course, continue to reveal whatever they pleased, whether or not they were wearing the braquette and contemporary reports indicate that this is exactly what they did."][62:  "In the early 1800s, for instance, there was a fashion in France for transparent, clinging dresses worn with no underclothing at all.  Between the 14th and mid-17th centuries, the traditional laced-up opening down the front of bodices worn by all women who could afford to wear a fashionably-cut dress, rather than a sack-like covering, was referred to as 'the gates of hell' and 'common shop of temptation'  And for a good reason.  Unmarried women who wished to signal their nubility, virginity and availability for marriage would often leave their bodices loose and open or even entirely undone, exposing the whole of the breasts.  As one commentator wrote of these nubile women in 1594: 'their round roseate buds immodestly lay forth, to shew at their hands there is fruit to be hoped.'  Another wrote that these young women often appeared 'in Publick quite naked from the Top of the Head, almost to the Waist, displaying their Neck, Shoulders, Breasts, and parts of their Waists quite bare.'  In France and Spain this fashion was referred to as an 'intolerable crime' and a 'pernicious scandal' whilst in Italy and elsewhere it was generally accepted, and referred to as Vespoitrinement a la Venise with the more fashionable women of that city reported rouging their nipples."] [65-66:  "The French Revolution changed the rules overnight ... Another magazine editorial suggested that the new near- [66] naked fashion was 'like the sunshine introduced into the paintings of Titian.  It animates the figure and gives them all the embellishment that is needed ... displaying the true beauty of the person to the greatest possible advantage,' and the article continues: 'never were our fair females so sparsely dressed, covered with nothing more than transparent shawls, that float and flutter over their breasts, which are clearly seen through them; and with a robe so fine that the wearer seemed to be almost naked.' "] [67: "Poets and social commentators praised the scanty Naked Fashion of the early 19th century on the grounds of its social equality."][77: "Despite what our parents and grandparents may say on the subject, and despite the fact that they have photographs to show how demure and dignified they were, the new fashionable styles worn by the majority of urban dwellers in their day were just as sexually provocative and shocking to their parents' generation as those being worn by the young avant-garde city dwellers of today."] [80: "After World War I life changed completely.  Cars were everywhere, air travel had been introduced and jazz music had arrived.  There was also a noticeable shortage of eligible young men, and the young women began to dress in sexually explicit clothing in order to attract a mate or a paramour.  Beadwork that echoed the female genitals and see-through tops became almost commonplace."] [81: "As the 1920's progressed, dresses grew shorter.  In 1925 the Archbishop of Naples declared that the death and devastation caused by an earthquake at Amalfi, 'was due to the anger of God protesting against the present immodesty of dress.'  In Ohio a bill was introduced to prohibit any female over 14 'from wearing a skirt which does not reach that part of the foot known as the instep.' "] [86: "In the 1930's, topless bathing had been actively promoted in the magazines of the period.  This drawing by Lepape was featured on the cover of French Vogue in 1934."][94:  "Modesty is relative.  If this young warrior from the Alto Xingu on the Mato Grosso region of Brazil were to be asked to cover his genitals, he would be very embarrassed.  To some races, the act of covering up an area of the body only serves to draw attention to a feature that, when naked, passes unnoticed."][99: "Xinguano Indians from the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.  The young girls [top], naked except for their body paint, have a strict code about who can touch who, and where.  The young girls with hip bands are drawing attention to their newly-acquired sexual maturity."] [121, re female feet & shoes :"Many writers have suggested that the reason for this erotic connection was that women's shoes show off to great advantage the foot, ankle and leg which are undoubtedly very important secondary sexual characteristics.  This was particularly true during the 16th to 19th centuries when a glimpse of an ankle or a dedicate shoe beneath the hem of a skirt reportedly 'drove men to distraction' as it was 'a symbol of the delights which were above'. "][179: "But changes do eventually take place in the way people dress and the physical attributes they are allowed to display or must conceal.  Traditions change and change again as each new generation seeks to establish its own sartorial code.  This will continue to be the western way of things until we are once again willing to accept ourselves as complete beings in our natural naked state with no need to conceal our bodies behind our clothing fantasies, except when we so choose."]

Roosevelt, Theodore.  Theodore Roosevelt:  An Autobiography.  New York:  Scribner's, 1920.  p. 45 [President Theodore Roosevelt frequently swam nude in Rock Creek Park in Washington, once skinnydipping with the French diplomat Jules Jusserand.]

Rudofsky, Bernard.  The Unfashionable Human Body.  Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1971.  ISBN 0-385-05995-7.  [15: "Man which glories in his raiment is like a robber that glories in the brand of irons wherewith he is branded, since it was Adam's sin that rendered garments necessary.  St. Bernard."] [25-26: "It is shame that we are forever confusing with modesty. ... Whichever way we look at it, modesty, or what we take for it, is complex.  Put together of any number of ill-fitting parts, it reveals itself in more or less irrational taboos that differ not only with every civilization but often within a civilization itself.  Like most taboos, [26] they defy logic.  Moreover, they are highly unstable; a principle rigidly upheld today, tomorrow is abandoned and forgotten.  Not that there has been any lack of efforts to bring light into the matter.  Anthropologists have patiently searched every corner of the globe for common and rare manifestations of modesty, sifted and examined them but, as was to be expected, failed to come up with any conciliatory view on the subject.  Havelock Ellis, who probably has written more about modesty than any other man, saw in it only an agglomeration of fears."][26-27: "To confuse matters still further, a few races show a complete reversal of our concepts of modesty to the point where in some parts of the world only harlots wear clothes.  Indeed, the fact that some people habitually go naked does not mean that they [27] are shameless ..."][27: "Moreover, going naked, like going hungry, can be a powerful form of protest.  St. Francis of Assisi, an exemplary saint and surely no exhibitionist, once went on what might be called a sartorial hunger strike; 'on being rebuked by his bishop, he snatched off his clothes and walked naked through the streets.' "][29: "In some Mohammedan countries a woman will cover her face rather than her body when surprised naked.  Yet her reaction is quite consistent with the belief that modesty, or immodesty, is written on the face.  By hiding it she takes refuge into anonymity. ... To cite an extreme case:  Family relations in Armenia being what they were in the seventeenth century, a wife did not remove her veil until she had put her husband to bed and extinguished the lights.  Since she also got up before him, a man might be married for years without catching a glimpse of his wife's face."][29-30: "Another instance of symbolic decapitation for modesty's sake is mentioned by a European traveler who visited Arabia at the turn of the century.  He was received at a princely palace in Oman where the ladies of the house wore diaphanous gowns and had their faces [30] covered with 'black masks.'  they looked at him, he noticed, with embarrassment and, having met his glance, lowered their eyes in shame.  Not, he explained, because they were lightly dressed but because his face was uncovered.  He was made to understand that his unmasked face appeared to them as indecent as a naked person would appear to him.  'They begged him to assume a mask and when a waiting woman had bound one around his head, everybody was satisfied.' "][41: "France had similar problems.  A contemporary of Bulwer's, the learned Abbe Boileau, in his treatise A just and seasonable Reprehension of naked Breasts and Shoulders, warned that 'the sight of a beautiful bosom is as dangerous as that of a basilisk.' (Basilisks, by the sheer ferocity of their appearance, turned people into stone, or as we would say today, gave them a heart attack.)"][49: "At times only the husband was allowed to see his wife's naked feet.  This held true for such dissimilar civilizations as nineteenth-century China and seventeenth-century Spain.  During the reign of Philip II, women's clothes touched the floor and never showed as much as the suspicion of a shoe.  Carriages had specially fitted doors with a collapsible mechanism that could be lowered like a curtain to hide the feet of a dismounting woman.  When the queen suggested that female dress be shortened so that it would raise less dust, men sternly opposed such change.  They preferred, they said, to see their wives dead rather than share the sight of their feet with other men.  Such intimacy represented a strictly connubial privilege and was called la derniere faveur.  We have the description of an accident in which the queen of Spain fell from a horse and was dragged along by it, her foot having been caught in a stirrup.  A great number of dignitaries and troops watched the scene with horror, unable to give aid to the queen without committing the unspeakable crime of touching her foot.  When two gentlemen lost their self-control and saved her from certain death, they had sense enough to flee to a convent and there to await the royal pardon.  A similar story, reported at about the same time, reads like a scenario for a romantic ballet, complete with the appropriate tragic ending.  A nobleman enamored of his guest, the queen, burned down his castle in order to have the opportunity of acting her savior.  Everything went according to plan except that a page who witnessed the rescue noticed that he touched the august feet.  The king, upon learning this, personally dispatched the offender with a pistol shot."][50: "Covered feet symbolized chastity, even in Pagan territory.  In ancient Rome, prostitutes were denied the use of shoes although no objections were made to their wearing sandals; 'their feet's brilliant whiteness acted afar as a pimp to attract looks and desires.'  By the same token, the Church declares sandals to be all right for monks but not for nuns.  Virgin goddesses were sometimes portrayed with shoes, even when otherwise stark naked.  Clearly, woman's sandal stands for sexual freedom; it is unknown in Western rural societies."] [69: "In spite of its relative novelty, the bathing suit has a history.  At the turn of the century, when sea bathing had been declared harmless to health, bathing suits were gay and opulent.  Perhaps because men felt foolish about cavorting on the beach, they appropriated the striped tricots of animal trainers and jugglers for their outfit.  Women were choosier.  Segregated from the men, they nevertheless dressed with abandon, forever mindful of man's secret weapon, the spy-glass.  On the seaboard voyeurism was promoted from a do-it-your-self hobby to a public institution.  Policemen, who have a natural tendency to panic at the sight of an insufficiently clad woman, were instructed to arrest bathers whose clothes did not comply with the official measurements of modesty.  Swimming clubs decreed that male bathing suits must reach 'not less than three inches from the bifurcation down,' and those of women not more than three inches above the knee.  Similar rules applied to the length of sleeves.  'The modesty of women,' noted a contemporary newspaper, 'is thus seen to be greater than that of men by about two inches.' "][70: "Flugel seems to have been unaware that bathers without bathing suits had their day within his own lifetime.  In the nineteen-twenties, in some parts of Europe people used to bathe in public without feeling the need for a special dress.  At the height of summer the beaches on the Black Sea swarmed with bathers who had  never seen a bathing suit except in newspapers and picture magazines; their holiday was one of untroubled simplicity."][70-71: "Imagine any upright man's reaction a hundred years ago had [71] he been able to foresee that his female offspring would show herself bare-bellied in public.  Would he, in response to such foreknowledge, have killed his breed to save the family's honor?  He probably would have had no other choice."][71: "At the turn of the century the liberation of women's legs seemed as far off as that of the female bosom seems today."][128: "The Harvard College Book of 1649 decreed:  'For as much as the wearing of long hair after the manner of ruffians and barbarous Indians has begun to invade New England and contrary to the rule of God's word which says it is a shame for a man to wear long hair.' "][140:" Nearly a century ago, Alexander von Humboldt pointed out that body painting is nowise inferior to the art of dress.  'If painted nations,' he wrote, 'had been examined with the same attention as clothed ones, it would have been perceived that the most fertile imagination and the must mutable caprice have created the fashions of painting as well as those of garments.' "][180: "In the New World, that heretical contrivance, bloomers, fared worse.  'I never believed in total depravity until I wore the reform dress in New York,' wrote Maria M. Jones, another pioneering woman.  On the street, trousered women had to face moral and physical assault.  Youngsters found in them an ideal target for snowballs and, in the warm season, for apple cores.  Adults, not wanting to be left out, pelted them with verbal abuse.  Even clergymen could be distinctly heard in the chorus of insulting voices.  Women wearing the new dress were unceremoniously thrown out of churches and told that their attire would not be tolerated in places of worship or lecture halls."][180: "Physicians, who might have been expected to be on the side of reason, or at least to welcome a more hygienic female dress, lacked the courage to support the cause of the reformers.  Unable to produce any sound argument against bifurcated skirts, they contented themselves with joining the mob's laughter.  'The idea of females wearing trousers,' wrote The Medical Times, 'may be scouted as ridiculous.' "][199: "In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1624), Burton observed that 'the greatest provocations of lust are from our apparel.' "][229-230: "Ancient Jewish female dress, one of apparel's dreariest types, is charitably omitted from costume histories, and with good reason.  Out of doors, an honest woman resembled nothing so much as a shapeless bundle.  And yet a man passing her in the street might have been shaken to the bones.  ... What he heard was the sound of the jingle bells she carried under her skirts.  Like the sleighbells on horses, they, too, were part of her harness.  Stepping chains, Palestine's contribution to erotic accessories, joined the angles together in a way that, according to the Encylopaedia Biblica, 'obliged the wearer to take short and tripping steps.'  Concealed by long garments, the unconventional jewelry betrayed its presence [230] only by its tinkling and a woman's mincing walk.  How admirable man's inventiveness, and woman's sense of humor, to make fun of a tyrannical scheme by setting the hobbled gait to musical accompaniment!  So deeply did this get-up affect the menfolk that it roused Isaiah to one of his inspired outbursts.  A seer by profession, he felt duty bound to make his famous and, as it turned out, accurate forecast on the decline of women's finery:  'The Lord will take away the beauty of their anklets, and the cauls, and the scresents; the pendants, and the bracelets, and the mufflers; the headtires, and the ankle chains.'  Scholarly dissertations have been written on the elegant fetters and the intense sensations they cause."]

Shields, Jody.  "Going Public."  Vogue 183.5, 288-291 (May 1993).  [289: "In Europe in the late fifteenth century, dresses were so low cut and cunningly designed that one preacher railed, 'One can see into the bosom ... and the nipples.'  City ordinances were passed against the stylish decolletage, much like today's 'topless' rules."][289: "By the sixteenth century, however, artists were depicting nipples as 'accessories,' much like jewels or false eyelashes.  In real life nipples were reddened and breasts whitened with makeup.  French noblewomen posed for portraits unselfconsciously unclothed.  Duchess Gabrielle d'Estrees and one of her sisters were painted together by an anonymous member of the School of Fontainbleau, naked from the waist up, one pinching the other's nipple--this action, it was understood, was a declaration of fertility."] [289-291: "A number of European fanatics, notably the clergy, condemned women to eternal torment in hell just for exposing a little too much breast.  They let loose with some pretty venomous antibreast literature in reacting to the nipple-revealing decolletage of the day.  In 1637 Pierre Juvernay, a Parisian, claimed that women who showed their breasts in this lifetime would have them tortured forever in the next."]

Smith, Dennis Craig and Sparks, Dr. William.  Growing Up Without Shame.  Los Angeles:  Elysium Growth Press, 1986.  ISBN 1-55599-001-0.   [96:  "The Cretans wore clothing that was unlike any worn by other ancient peoples.  Cretan women wore dresses that had the tight-waisted, corseted look of Western women's dress of the mid-1800's.  The skirts were long and bell shaped with layers of wide ruffles.  Blouses had sleeves, but left the breasts bare.] [121-146: History of Comstockian hysteria and subsequent cultural evolution toward acceptance of nudity.]

Wilcox, William B., Ed.  The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.  London:  Yale UP, 1972.  Franklin, B.  15:180  [180: Benjamin Franklin took daily naked 'air baths.'  "I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber, without any clothes whatsoever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing."]

Wagenknecht, Edward.  Henry David Thoreau:  What Manner of Man?  Amherst:  U of Massachusetts Press, 1981.  [83-84: Musing at boys bathing in a river, Thoreau wrote in his journal:  "What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his notebook, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties." (Thoreau 92).]

Ward, Roy Bowen, "Women in Roman Baths," Harvard Theological Review 85:2, 125-147 (1992) [125: "Tertullian of Carthage in his Apologeticum (197 CE) claimed that the Christians were no different from other people:  they went to the forum, the food market, and the baths (balneia)."][127: "It is also clear that the emergence of the Roman baths in the second century BCE was part of a larger social revolution in Roman society.  This revolution included what Eva Cantarella has termed the 'emancipation of women'; it was decried, however, by conservative Romans who longed for the good old days."][134: "Corresponding in time with the change of bath architecture, literary evidence beginning in the first century CE indicates that women were bathing with men."][135: "In another passage, again comparing the time of Cato (second to first century BCE) with present practices, Pliny made it clear that men and women were bathing together nude.  He referred to 'broiling baths' in which 'even the pubes (pectines) of women [are] exposed to public view.'"][139: "By the beginning of the second century, the evidence points to a change in bathing practice from the segregation of the sexes to mixed bathing.  In particular, the voices of conservative authors such as the Elder Pliny and Juvenal provide evidence that such a change had taken place.  These and other written sources suggest that the women who went to the baths included those who were married or marriageable and those economically situated to have slaves.  The archaeological evidence, moreover, shows that bath architecture had changed from the double baths to baths with only a single set of bath rooms.  In this period, the emancipation of women in many aspects of public life speaks against any idea that those women who once had access to the earlier, segregated baths would now be barred from the new, public baths with single facilities."][140: "Furthermore, archaeological evidence clearly shows that segregated baths were not being built in or after the time of Hadrian.  Not until the late fourth or fifth century is there evidence for architectural changes, namely, a change from bath rooms for collective bathing to individual tub systems."][142: "Evidence from Christian sources is often overlooked in the literature on women in Roman baths.  Clement of Alexandria in his Paedagogos (ca. 190-195 CE) was aware that women and men bathed together: 'The communal baths are opened to men and also at the same time to women' ... But he criticized this practice, arguing that 'bathing for pleasure ... is inadmissible.'  "][143: "Clement did not forbid his Christian readers from going to the baths; he allowed men to use the baths for the sake of health and women, for cleanliness and health.  He counseled that Christians should not bathe often.  It is clear from Clement that in Alexandria at the end of the second century--contemporaneous with Irenaeus and Tertullian--mixed bathing by all classes was not only customary but also a popular activity in which Christian men and women engaged."][146-147: "The study of available sources suggests that mixed bathing began sometime in the first century CE, became widespread and popular in Roman society by the end of the century ... and it continued to be popular until at least the end of the fourth century.  Archaeological evidence shows that the earlier double baths for men and women gave way to baths with a single set of facilities, an architectural feature that continued until at least the end of the fourth century.  Clearly, women and men could not be separated by space."][147: "These three, early, nonjudgmental, Christian references to Roman baths are intriguing: the silence about Roman baths in other Christian authors in the period before Clement of Alexandria, despite the evidence for the ubiquity and popularity of this prominent social institution, is interesting as well. ... Peter Brown comments on the 'indifference to nudity in Roman public life,' citing the public baths as one locus for nudity.  It appears that the earliest Christian authors may have been equally indifferent."]

Wright, Lawrence.  Clean and Decent:  The Fascinating History of the Bathroom & the Water Closet.  Great Britain:  U of Toronto Press, 1960.  Reprinted 1971.  ISBN 0-8020-6063-3.  [39-41: "King John took a bath about once every three weeks, and his subjects presumably less often.  The bath tub, like that of the monastery, was of wood; it is often found among the devices used as trade signs by the [41] coopers.  Such tubs, usually round, were sometimes lengthened into a form not unlike the modern bath, not to let the bather lie down, but to make room for others.  The communal tub had one naughty but one good reason; the good reason was the physical difficulty of providing hot water.  No modern householder who, with a frozen bathwaste, has baled out and carried away some 30 gallons of water, weighing 300 lb., will underrate the labour involved.  The whole family and their guests would bathe together while the water was hot.  Many pictures of the communal tub show a tray across the bath, with a meal on it, and perhaps musicians to add to the fun.  Many physicians protested against excessive drinking in the bath.  Nobody was shy: a charming illustration to a thirteenth-century manuscript shows a knight who dismounts from his steed to attend his lady's open-air tub; another shows a knight in his bath served by young women who shower him with rose-petals, the mediaeval equivalent of bath-salts.  In mediaeval stories of amorous intrigue, the two lovers usually begin their evening by bathing together.  Ideas of propriety were different from ours; the whole household and guests shared the one and only sleeping apartment, and wore no night-clothes until the sixteenth century.  It was not necessarily rude to be nude.  Home life seems to have combined luxury with discomfort, and a strange indifference to privacy."]

To be continued.


    Bibliography: Abstracts for Legal Defense--Part 4

    by Marvin Frandsen

Nudity--Psychological Health and Positive Social Effects

Ableman, Paul.  Anatomy of Nakedness.  London: Orbis Publishing, 1982.  ISBN 0-85613-175-8.  [31: "it would be nearer the truth to say that one important purpose of clothing is to emphasize the body rather than to conceal it."]  [84: "It has been left to the Americans, a traditionally pragmatic people, to devise what is probably the exact expression of the hunger for the lost body in a repressed culture: the strip-tease.  Basically, this is simply the public removal of her clothes by a more-or-less attractive woman.  Since this operation would be too brief to be commercially justifiable, it is padded with a little movement, even a few dance-steps, possibly some singing or dialogue, and it may be incorporated in a little sketch.  In England recently there was a vogue for male strippers, who performed before clamourous and unruly female audiences, which suggests that when women are not impeded by an imposed image of how they should behave they seek visual body gratification just as men do."]  [85: "But, of course, the satisfactions of the voyeuristic impulse provided by the media are themselves sublimated and synthetic.  They are not real substitutes for living in an unconcealed society where the body and its functions are part of the normal environment."]  [86: "It is remarkable that nowhere in the history of psychoanalytic thought... is there any suggestion that the fundamental perversion, to which many, if not all, particular perversions are essentially responses, is the concealment of the body that has resulted from the universal adoption of clothes.  From this perspective, calling voyeurism and exhibitionism 'perversions' is like calling the hungry man's obsessive concern with food perversion.  These 'perversions' are, in my opinion, simply assertions of instinctual imperatives, manifesting themselves in ways that a clothed society has outlawed."]  [91: "Finally, it is almost certainly true that children benefit.  Many people will recall from their own childhoods, and literary accounts amply confirm, that sexual curiosity can be a great burden.  Children who have had regular experience of nudism are undoubtedly less susceptible to this misery."]  pp. 50, 68, 84.  [Even in Victorian era, before the invention of bathing suits, swimming nude in the ocean was commonplace; and music halls often featured nude models as living 'sculpture.']  

Aquilino, M.L. and Ely, J.  "Parents and the sexuality of preschool children,"  Pediatric Nursing 11(1), 44-46 (1985).  [Child's sexual attitudes and values are instilled in first 5 years.]  [Most parents appeared very knowledgeable about the normal sexual curiosity and activity of their preschool children.]

Booth, Marie-Louise.  Parental Influence on Adult Sexual Anxiety.  Dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology.  Los Angeles, CA (1992).  [Individuals with less exposure to parental nudity experienced significantly higher levels of adult sexual anxiety than did the group with more childhood exposure to parental nudity.]

Brody, Liz.  "Are We Losing Our Girls?" Shape, p. 94-99-132-138 (Nov 1995)  Dissertation, Saybrook Institute (1984).[96: "Many girls around 11 or 12 start silencing their voices and losing their courage--the guts to speak one's mind straight from the heart--according to the pioneering work of Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D., and Carol Gilligan, Ph.D., who along with others at the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development have been studying adolescents for 20 years."]  [135: "it turned out that more than one-third of the girls had poor body image--17 percent falling into the 'low' group, with another 29 percent measuring 'low-mid.' "] [135: "Girls with high body image (high BI) are much more likely to say, 'I like most things about myself,' 'I am pretty good at a lot of things,' and, 'I have some good friends that I can count on,' than girls with low body image (low BI)."]  [137: "Seventy-three percent of girls with low BI say 'wanting to be attractive to boys' influences how they feel about their bodies.  Only 38 percent of girls with high BI name boys as a factor."]

DeGoede, Daniel L.  "Social Nudism and Body Concept,"  Dissertation, Saybrook Institute (1984).  Dissertation Abstracts International 45 (12), B3993-94 (1985).

Douglas, J.D., Rasmussen, P.K., and Flanagan, C.A. The Nude Beach.  Beverly Hills, CA: Sage (1977).

Downs, J.  "Nudity in Japanese visual media:  A cross-cultural observation,"  Archives of Sexual Behavior 19 (6), 583-585 (1990).  [Tradition of nudity in Japan, including mixed gender nude bathing, nude people working in fields.  Westernization brought changes.  Complexly different Japanese approach to nudity, both more permissive and more restrictive.  Overall Japanese are very modest personally but do not consider nudity to be a threat to moral standards.]

Fahringer, Herald Price.  "Equality in All Things: Drawing the Line on Nudity."  Criminal Law Bulletin 29.2, 137-146 (March-April 1993).  [139: "No showing was ever made in the Santorelli case that a bare-chested woman causes greater offense to the public than does a bare-chested man."]  [140: "At the very outset, it was argued that the issue of recreational equality for women should not be trivialized by any residual hostility left over from the time of patriarchal [sic] society."]  [140: "The notion that somehow the breasts of a man are less offensive than the breasts of a woman is illogical and constitutes a form of gender discrimination that is in every respect 'inherently invidious.'  What's more, requiring women to cover their breasts in public is a highly visible expression of inequality between men and women that promotes an attitude that demeans women and damages their sense of equality."]  [141: "Appellants acknowledged that some people, with a heightened sense of decorum, may respond to a bare-chested woman more markedly than to a bare-chested man.  But this reaction stems from a masculine ideology that has plagued our culture for over 200 years and has doomed generates of women to a secondary status.  The court was encouraged not to focus its inquiry on any abstract or speculative moral imperatives claimed to be protected....  The real hazard of a statute... lies in its perpetuation of a sexual stereotype that has no place in a society so deeply committed to equality."]  [141: "The most powerful proof that a bare-breasted woman causes no social harm was the startling revelation [sic] that forty-eight states have no law barring a woman from baring her breasts in public."]  [143: "And finally, massive sociological data in support of the appellants' claim was mobilized at battalion strength and hurled into the breach in the appellate court.  Scientific studies on the subject of breast exposure show that the true impact of the exposure of the human breasts is no different whether it be that of a man or a woman.  The classic Kinsey investigation of male (1948) and female (1953) sexuality, the largest and most authoritative study of its kind, concluded unequivocally that there is no difference in the extent to which male and female breasts can be used to provide sexual stimulation.  No subsequent study has ever questioned these findings."]  [144: "It is sometimes claimed that, although physiologically similar with respect to potential stimulation, women's and men's breasts differ perceptually in that, in our culture, some men find women's breasts to be an erotic stimulus.  But our notions of sexual arousal are masculine.  Who is to say that a man's bare chest is not just as arousing to women as a woman's bare chest to a man?"]  144: One of the more striking pieces of research disclosed to the court was a random study of opposite-sex preferences, which revealed that 51 percent of the women ranked a man's chest as the most stimulating part of a man's body, whereas only 38 percent of the men reported a women's breasts as the most stimulating."]  [144-145: "Dr. Rita Freedman, a psychologist, testified that women's and men's breasts are physiologically similar.  However, the [145] required covering of women's breasts contributes to an obsession with breasts and leads to a variety of harmful consequences that are actually counterproductive to important government objectives.  It serves to preserve the terrible prejudices that are the product of a rank male supremacy that has tormented women during the past century.  Such consequences include discouraging breast-feeding, poor mental and physical health for women, unnecessary cosmetic surgery (breast augmentation), and avoidance of breast examination.  Dr. Freedman explained that women's breasts are no more an no less sex organs than are men's breasts."] [141-143: Theoretically, in 48 states--all but Indiana and, as of 1994, Michigan--'a woman can go to the beach and remove her blouse in the same way a man can, and not be criminally prosecuted.']

Finch, S.M.  "Viewing other-sex genitals,"  Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 16 (1), 72 (1982).  [72: "Q: By adolescence, have most girls seen male genitalia?  Is it beneficial for them to have this experience?  A: It is fair to assume that by adolescence most girls have seen male genitalia, particularly if they have male siblings or if families are not overly modest.  It is beneficial for children to learn gradually and comfortably about sexual matters.  Observation of anatomic differences should be part of the learning experience and should not be associated with guilt or secrecy."]

Fisher, Seymour.  "Body Decoration and Camouflage."  Dimensions of Dress and Adornment: A Book of Readings.  3rd ed.  Eds. Lois M. Gurel and Marainne S. Beeson.  Dubuque, IA:  Hendall/Hunt, 1979.   [138-142:  The wearing of clothes represents a form of submission to prevailing mores.  It is like putting on a 'citizen's uniform' and agreeing to play the game.]

Ford, Darlene Ora Stanridge.  Fashion Indicators of Women's Social Status.  Denton, Texas, Texas Women's University: Dissertation, University Microfilms International, 1985.  [Repression of healthy nudity, especially for females, is a means of enforcement of sex role control of females.]  [1: "Cothing researchers and theorists have echoed the words of Anatole France, French novelist, critic, and Nobel Prize winner:  'If I were allowed to choose from the pile of books which will be published one hundred years after my death, do you know which one I would take?  No, by no means would I select a novel from that future library--I would simply take a fashion magazine so that I would see how women dress one century after my departure.  And these rags would tell me more about the humanity of the future than all the philosophers, novelists, prophets, and scholars.' "]  [1-2: "Kody Mazda, Divisional Vice-President and Merchandise Manager of John Wanamaker in Philadelphia told the National Retail Merchant's Association that 'few things are more responsive to social change than apparel.  It provides the most visible signal of an individual's role in the community, a projection of self-image, and a system of social [2]  values.' "]  [20: "The investigator employed the Thurstone method of equal-appearing intervals in the development of a nine-point pictorial scale that ranged from 1, completely nude, to 9, completely covered.  The scale was employed in a quantitative measurement of the degree of body exposure evidenced in female fashions."]  [22-23: "Keiser (71) traced trends in women's fashion in the United States from 1848, the beginning of the women's rights movement, to 1975 in an effort to relate fashion changes to changes in the lifestyle and status of women in American society....  Keiser arrived at a number of conclusions based on the historical information uncovered by her research:  1) clothing styles became less restricting following each change in female roles during the past 100 years; 2) the average woman lacked the courage to be associated with radical movements for change; a movement had to be generally [23] accepted before the average women altered her dress style to reflect the change, and 3) the existence of the phenomenon of cyclic and changing emphasis on specific erogenous zones in fashion was verified."]  [25-26: "Ferris (51) identified 12 possible indicators of women's social status based on statistical information about life situations women experience:  1) the ratio of women to men, 2) educational level, 3) marital status, 4) fertility rates, 5) labor force status, 6) employment status, 7) income, 8) organizational membership, 9) types of recrea-[25]-tional participation, 10) health, 11) length of life and cause of death, and 12) migration rates."]  [37: "The present study was designed to determine the relative cross-cultural significance of each of three fashion variables (exposure of the female body, distortion of the natural female body, and clothing communication of the sexual identity of an androgynous body) as indicators of women's social status.  Basic style components of traditional female fashion were scaled relative to each of the three fashion variables."]  [42: "The fashion scales that were developed were the following:  the Nudity-Cover Scale (N-C), the Natural Female Body-Distortion Scale (NFB-D), and the Masculinity-Feminity Scale (M-F).  The fashion variables that were evaluated as indicators of female social status were: 1) the degree of fashionably required cover of the female body, 2) the degree of fashionable distortion of the natural female body, and 3) the relative sexual identity of the fashionable costume."]  [42: "The sample consisted of 30 social cultures selected on the basis of stratification of time and geographical area."]  [228: "The highly significant negative correlation between women's social status and the fashion variable of natural female body-distortion indicated that the degree of fashionable distortion of the natural female body is a highly reliable indicator of the social status level of women cross-culturally.  As the social status of women rose, fashionable distortion of the natural female body decreased cross-culturally."]  [228-229: "The significant negative correlation between women's social status and the fashion variable of nudity-cover indicated that the [229] degree of fashionably required cover of the female body is a reliable indicator of the level of social status of women cross-culturally.  As the social status of women rose, less cover of the female body was required."]  [229: "The low negative correlation between women's social status and the fashion variable of masculinity-femininity indicated that the relative sexual identity communicated by the fashionable costume is not a reliable indicator of the level of female social status cross-culturally.  As the social status of women rose, the fashionable costume did not necessarily communicate a more masculine or more feminine identity cross-culturally; however, the fashionable costume tended to communicate a relatively less feminine identity in those cultures that evidenced a high level of female status than in those cultures that evidenced a low level of female social status."]  [230: "Based on the hypotheses formulated for this investigation, the following conclusions were drawn:  Hypothesis 1: A significant relationship exists cross-culturally between the degree of fashionably required cover of the female body and women's social status.  Results of the Spearman rank correlation revealed a significant inverse relationship at the 0.05 level of probability between the level of women's social status and the degree of fashionably required cover of the female body cross-culturally.  Therefore, Hypothesis 1 was supported."]  [230: "Hypothesis 2.  A significant relationship exists cross-culturally between the fashionable distortion of the natural female body and women's social status.  Results of the Spearman rank correlation revealed a significant inverse relationship at the 0.01 level of probability between the level of women's social status and the degree of fashionable distortion of the natural female body cross-culturally.  Therefore, Hypothesis 2 was supported."]  [231: "Hypothesis 3.  A significant relationship exists cross-culturally between the relative sexual identity communicated by the fashionable costume for women and women's social status.  Results of the Spearman rank correlation revealed no significant relationship between women's social status and the relative sexual identity communicated by the fashionable female costume.  Therefore, Hypothesis 3 was not supported."]

Flugel, John Carl.  The Psychology of Clothes.  London:  Hogarth, 1930, 1940, 1950.  [Department of Psychology in the University of London]  [26: "... it is only in the last few years that there has been any clear realisation of the fact that clothes not only serve to arouse sexual interest but may themselves actually symbolise the sexual organs."]  [60: "... so far as the actual fear of causing disgust is concerned; there are, for instance, persons who can be made to feel even 'physically ill' by the sight of unusually exposed bodies (while bathing, for instance); and this abnormal sensitivity is, after all, only an extension of feelings that are capable of being aroused in almost everyone, e.g. by disease or deformity."]  [61: "A jealous husband does not want his wife to rouse too great admiration in other men, and the easiest of all ways of avoiding this is to keep her hidden.  This may be done by actually excluding her from male society, as is of course to a large extent the custom in many Oriental countries.  But the same object can be achieved to some extent by hiding her body from the view of men on such occasions as she does venture into public places....  In fact, it may be said that the whole Moslem theory of women's outdoor dress represents an attempt--sometimes desperate in its thoroughness--to avoid the arousal of sexual desire in men; a theory which is, of course, logically in harmony with a social system which stresses the view that all women are the property of some man or another."]  [109: "The--by now extensive--experience of the 'Friends of Nature' would seem to show that this contention is correct, the chief reason probably being that the increased pleasures of exhibitionism and of skin and muscle eroticism have drained off a certain quantity of sexual energy which might otherwise have taken a purely genital channel."]  [138: "There can be little doubt that the ultimate and essential cause of fashion lies in competition; competition of a social and a sexual kind, in which the social elements are more obvious and manifest and the sexual elements more indirect, concealed, and unavowed, hiding themselves, as it were, behind the social ones."]  [191: "... it seems doubtful whether modesty in the second sense is ever of much value in itself, since its tendency is inevitably hostile to a true evaluation of certain 'real' factors.  In so far as reference to, or exposure of, certain parts of the body is considered 'rude' or 'immodest' (apart from the purpose of the reference or exposure) and gives rise to corresponding emotions, there cannot but occur an inclination to conceal and distort the true functions and importance of these parts of the body--in fact a tendency to refuse the full recognition of their real existence.  ... restraints on the recognition of reality (even though they be undertaken in the interests of morality) we have learnt to look upon as highly dangerous."]  [192: "The much more thorough experiments of 'Nude Culture' point in the same direction.  Indeed if, as is often done, we content ourselves with the simple equation of the immoral with the genitally sexual, these experiments show pretty conclusively that nakedness is a potent method of reducing immorality."]  [192: "The real point to bear in mind is that modesty is essentially correlated with desire.  Its purpose is to fight desire, but in so doing it rekindles it, so that a circular process is inevitably set in motion."]  [192-193: "Nature has, in fact, provided that modesty can never finally attain its end except through its own disappearance.  And this disappearance involves also the loss of a certain piquancy in desire, a piquancy that can only come when desire and inhibition are adroitly intermingled.  Here is perhaps the real rub--the very justifiable fear that in overcoming modesty we shall deprive ourselves also of the most maddeningly stimulating elements of desire.  Thus it is that, hiding under the cloak of modesty, there are [193] often to be found certain subtle components of the sexual urge itself; a strange alliance, but one that resembles that which we have already seen to exist in the combined phallic and moral symbolism of certain clothes, and one that psycho-analysis has shown to be thoroughly characteristic of the neurotic mind.  Modesty is, therefore, not merely an obstacle to the clear apprehension of external reality; it also fosters something in the nature of internal (albeit for the most part unconscious) hypocrisy, and thus stands condemned on a double charge of distorting the appearance both of our bodies and our minds."]  [235-236: "Modesty, as we have seen, when its essentially ambivalent nature is recognized, can interpose no reasonable obstacle to nudity; nor, in the long run, can economics--for, in so far as clothes cease to satisfy a need, they fall into the category of useless or conventional extravagances that are better done away with, since the effort, time, or money spent on them can be more profitably employed elsewhere.  Hygiene, too, applauds nakedness in many circumstances, and is placing more and more faith in the unaided functions of the human skin.  Convenience can surely offer no serious objection, so long as some kind of sartorial harness allows us to transport with reasonable ease the instruments required [236] in daily life.  Apart from this, the saving of time and trouble spent in dressing (or perhaps the more profitable employment of this time in the cause of bodily perfection) and the facility with which the natural skin can be cleaned if dirty, dried if wet, are all in favor of nakedness rather than apparel."]  [237-238: "We must honestly face the conclusion that our principle points ultimately, not to clothing, but to nakedness.  Here also we are not alone, and our company, if less numerous, is at least worthy of consideration.  Apart from the (in some countries) very numerous practitioners of nude culture and its semi-official spokesmen, there have been several other writers within the last few years who have anticipated us in this conclusion.  The 'men like gods', who inhabited Mr. H. G. Wells' Utopia, were naked. Mr. Gerald Heard, as the result of his philosophical and historical survey, considers that clothing is destined to vanish from the earth.  More [237] recently still, Mr. Langdon Davies, taking Godiva as his patron saint, leads us with much eloquent persuasiveness towards the same view as to the ultimate inevitability of nakedness.  The boldest of all prophets is Professor Knight Dunlap, who believes that nakedness will be at first a uni-sexual affair, but holds that 'within a few years' women at least will expose the whole body in public, and will cause but little commotion by so doing."]  [238: "Encouraged thus, we may with greater equanimity contemplate the possibility that dress is, after all, destined to be but an episode in the history of humanity, and that man (and perhaps before him woman) will one day go about his business secure in the control both of his own body an of his wider physical environment, disdaining the sartorial crutches on which he perilously supported himself during the earlier tottering stages of his march towards a higher culture."]

Glazer, Reena N.  "Women's Body Image and the Law."  Duke Law Journal 43, 113-147 (1993).  [114: "One noted psychologist has written that '[o]ur body image is at the very core of our identity.'  Women have been shown to be more sensitive and to attach more significance to body image than men."]  [115:"This Note argues that the law has contributed to the creation of an environment in which women are conditioned to hate their bodies and strive for an unrealistic and unattainable ideal form.  Criminalizing the mere exposure of women's breasts while allowing men to expose theirs sends a strong message to both women and men as to how they should feel about women's bodies."]  [115, fn 19: "Criminal legal sanctions, unlike other penalties in American law, carry strong moral and stigmatic overtones.  'The stigma of condemnation is one of the distinctive characteristics, if not the distinctive characteristic, differentiating the criminal law from other kinds of legal sanctions.'  Peter W. Lowe et. al., Criminal Law: Cases and Materials 3-4 (2d ed. 1986)."]  [116: "The very sight of the bare breast is a crime, regardless of the woman's intent....  This statutory double standard embodies the inequality between men and women in society.  Men are free to expose their chests in virtually any surroundings they choose with no consideration of the impact on possible viewers.  New York Penal Law section 245.01, however, is written solely to take into account potential viewers.  The focus is on the male response to viewing topless women; there is no focus on the female actor herself.  This inverted structure of point of view helps to maintain men's objectification of women.  Male power is perpetuated by regarding women as objects that men act on and react to rather than as actors themselves.  When women are regarded as objects, a great deal of importance rests on their appearances because their entire worth is derived from the reaction they can induce from men.  In order to maintain the patriarchal system, men must determine when and where this arousal is allowed to take place.  In this way, the (heterosexual) male myth of a woman's breast has been codified into law.  Because women are the sexual objects and property of men, it follows that what might arouse men can only be displayed when men want to be aroused.  For example, the statute contains an exemption for topless entertainment, for which the audience is overwhelmingly male.  In [117] adopting the statutory standard, no consideration was given to contexts in which women might enjoy going topless for their own reasons, regardless of any effect on male viewers.  Nor was any consideration given to the fact that women might not be bothered by the sight of other women's breasts."]  [118: "No one is claiming that women's breasts are identical to men's--clearly, they are not.  Likewise, there is no request for any special treatment.  Women are only seeking the option to do what men are already free to do.  In this context, although difference exists, it should not matter."]  [128: "The State, however, offered no evidence to show that a woman's chest causes greater public harm than a man's does.  This assumption--that women's breasts are offensive in a way that men's breasts are not--underlies the statute."]  [129: "... in Palmore v. Sidoti, the U.S. Supreme Court held on equal protection grounds that offense to public sensibilities and potential societal stigmatization were not sufficient to terminate a mother's custody rights merely because she was romantically involved with a man of a different race."]  [129: "Other than societal presuppositions, there is no inherent reason why exposure of the female breast is any more offensive than exposure of the male breast.  Other Western societies do not share this assumption; in fact, topless sunbathing is common in Europe."]  [130: "Anatomically, men's and women's breasts are fairly similar, which suggests that the law should treat the two similarly.  Dr. Jack Morin has concluded that '[p]hysiologically, men's and women's breasts have the same erotic potential, with virtually identical anatomy, except that women's breasts are obviously more developed.  Similarities include a rich supply of nerve endings, especially within the nipple and surrounding areola.  In addition, the nipples of both sexes have erectile capacity."]  [130: "One underlying argument for distinguishing between male and female breasts is that they are sexually stimulating to differing degrees.  It seems obvious, and it has been borne out in research, that men find women's breasts sexually stimulating.  Therefore, the argument goes, women's breasts should not be exposed in public.  A basic problem with this argument is that researchers have also found that the chest is the male body part most sexually stimulating to women."]  [130: "The fact that forty-eight other states have not criminalized the mere exposure of a woman's breasts severely weakens the asserted rationale for gender classification...: that the public must be protected from the great evil that the exposed female breast poses.  New York and Indiana are the only two states that have laws prohibiting the mere exposure of women's breasts."]  [132: "The statutory isolation of New York and Indiana is heightened by a number of state court decisions that have explicitly held that a breast is not a 'private part' and that breast exposure is not lewd in and of itself."]  [136: "As Mary Whisner has explained, women are missing from the Buchanan court's analysis.  The court paid no attention to the women's mind-set, motives, or intentions.  The women's desire to and enjoyment of going topless was not even considered; their interest was considered only as it related to male viewers.  Moreover, what the court considered to be sexually arousing was viewed only from the (heterosexual) male point of view.  Either the court was under the mistaken impression that women are not aroused by male chests, or it desired, consciously or subconsciously, to reinforce stereotypes of women as passive sexual beings who even when 'aroused... would not react so as to disturb the public order.' "]  [136: "Because (heterosexual) male viewers could be aroused by the sight of female breasts, women are guilty."]  [139: "Men are not made to feel different because they do not breastfeed; women, however, are made to feel different and uncomfortable because they do breast-feed....  By viewing the situation from the male perspective, soci-[140]-ety continually places breast-feeding mothers in uncomfortable situations and perpetually reminds them of their 'otherness.' "]  [140 fn. 154: "Because a patriarchal society uses the male as the standard, women are made to feel like outcasts because they do something--breast-feed--that men do not do.  Men, in contrast, are not made to feel inferior because of their inability to breast-feed."]  [141: "In the United States, women rarely see other women naked.  Such exposure only occurs with any regularity in the movies, and actresses rarely embody the average female form.  Women have, in effect, been kept ignorant about the realities of their own bodies. ... Women, however, have no similar 'locker room experience.'  The only other naked female forms they are allowed to see are cover girls and Barbie dolls. This isolation has been very effective in conditioning women to believe that the cover girl is the only acceptable body image for women.  Women have willingly lined up at plastic surgeons' offices because they have been conditioned to believe that breasts only come in one acceptable form; if their breasts do not fit this model, something is wrong with the way they, as women, appear.  Women are kept from realizing that 'breasts come in as many shapes and variations as there are women.' "]  [Women's breasts are sexually stimulating only because they are inaccessible.] 116, 135, 117, 136, 139.  [Male power  perpetuated by regarding women as objects.  Psychology of women as objects and property of men implies that what might arouse men can only be displayed when men want to be aroused.  Women as temptress leads to sanction of idea that men have uncontrollable urges and violence against women is inevitable.]  p. 130 [Men's breasts have same erotic capacity as women's.]

Gardner, R. A. "Exposing children to parental nudity," Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 9 (6), 99-100 (June 1975).  [99: "In my opinion, a healthy home atmosphere is one in which the child up to the late prepubertal period (ages 10 to 11) is permitted to occasionally observe his parents in the nude--in natural and casual situations.  I believe that it can be psychologically detrimental to strictly hide one's body from one's children, because such an attitude fosters the development of unnatural curiosities and excessive cravings which may contribute to neurotic attitudes toward the opposite sex. There is no question that unnatural social attitudes toward the genitalia produce a curiosity in the child that might not otherwise have occurred.  In a more open atmosphere, such curiosities are lessened.  Furthermore, such an attitude serves to counteract pathological views on sex which are produced by a culture in which the ubiquitous use of seduction in the mass media and elsewhere fosters neurotic sexual preoccupations."]  [100: "The child who is receiving adequate affection, protection, and guidance in a stable home will certainly wish to be an adult with all the privileges and gratifications that adulthood entails.  He will not single out his parents' genitalia for particular emulation, nor will he consider his own organ to be painfully deficient.  The neurotic child may do so, but it will not be because he has seen his parents nude but because of the defects in his relationship with them--defects having little or nothing to do with the dressing situation."]

Goldman, R.J. and Goldman, J.D.  "Children's perceptions of clothes and nakedness: a cross-national study," Genetic Psychology Monographs 104, 163-185 (1981).  [168: "the 838 S's were from age groups 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15, drawn from state coeducational kindergartens and schools in urban-suburban areas in Melbourne, Australia; Reading, England; Stockholm, Sweden, and both sides of the Niagara River, Upper New York State, U.S.A., and Ontario, Canada.]  [168: "In the study reported here the children were asked three questions.  'Suppose we all lived in a nice warm place or climate, would we need to wear clothes?'  'Why should this be so?'  (What are the reasons for saying 'Yes' or 'No').  'Some people feel shy or funny about (revealing) certain parts of the body; why should this be so?"]  [170: "The North American children appear to be most adamant about the wearing of clothes and the Swedish children the least, both interestingly living in very cold winter climates."]  [170: "Overall there appears to be a move towards the more positive need to wear clothes by the teenage cohorts across all countries, perhaps reflecting awareness of pubertal growth and its sexual significance.  This is apparent from most of the answers of the 13- and 15-year-olds."]  [170: "If these figures can be taken as an indicator of sexual inhibitions of some kind, and it is not necessarily assumed that they are, then the North American children are the most inhibited about nakedness and the Swedish children the least, with certain sex differences occurring, particularly seen in some teenage girls' cohorts."]  [174: "The English scores, however, continue to reflect preconventional thinking throughout all age levels and only 28% achieve post conventional thinking at 15 years.  The Swedish scores show a symmetrical pattern, preconventional to 9 years, conventional thinking at 11 years, and post-conventional thinking at 15 years, although barely achieved as a trend at 50%.  In comparative terms it is evident that the ranking of postconventional thinking at 15 years in highest scores Australia (80%) is highest, Sweden (50%) and North America (42%) are moderate, and England (28%) is the lowest."]  [174: "Swedish girls of 7 years, Australian girls of 11 years, and English girls of 15 years, score much higher than the boys in the same age cohorts; while English 7-year-old boys, and North American and Swedish 15-year-old boys score much higher than the girls in the same cohorts."]  [180, 182: "Considerable sex differences are evident in practically every age group in the English-speaking countries where boys consistently and markedly achieve higher scores than the girls (the exception is the Australian 15-year-olds where boys and girls score equally).  These sex differences are evident also in the Swedish sample where 13- and 15-year-old boys reveal markedly higher scores than the girls in those age groups not quite achieving significant levels.  The one exception in Sweden is in the opposite direction [182] where the 7-year-old Swedish girls score significantly higher than Swedish 7-year-old boys.  The investigators would identify these as genuine sex differences, not apparently affected by interviewer differences, revealing possibly a greater willingness by boys to explore the problems of why nakedness would embarrass some people.  Even so, male mean scores in only a few age cohorts achieve more than 4.00 (the highest is 4.20 scored by 15-year-old Swedish and English boys) drawing attention to the difficulty of this item for even the oldest children in the sample."]  [183: "Several interesting issues are raised by the results reported.  The first is that the opinions of the English-speaking children differ considerably from the Swedish children in asserting clothes are necessary even in very warm climates.  The most insistent are the North American children, the least being the Australian.  The rank order of opinions--North America, England, Australia--reflects a gradation of climate, especially in winter, among the 5- to 11-year-olds possibly indicating a 'protectionist theory' for the wearing of clothes.  The Swedish exception, where winters are as severe and mild summers are relatively short, would appear to indicate that cultural influence may be stronger than climate, supporting current anthropological theories.  In Sweden sex education is compulsory in all schools from the age of eight, and the social acceptance of a more open approach to sex, illegitimacy, and related matters may well influence children's judgments."]  [183: "The modal score for all countries from 7 years onwards was that of conventional thinking.  This low level thinking about sexual dilemmas has been noted in other studies and is evident in other sections of this current study."]  [183-184: The picture revealed by the children's perceptions in this area illustrates societies where the wearing of clothes is rationalized on moral grounds, and nakedness, particularly sexual nakedness, is still strongly tinged with guilt.  While younger children do reflect an innocence about the issues raised, older children are well aware of the need for conformity and the social sanctions to [184] be faced if the 'natural' naked state were to be taken too far.  Teenagers particularly show sensitivity to physical and sexual abnormalities, sometimes imagined, and reflect overwhelming conventional law and order morality, with a poor grasp of universal ethical principles even at 15 years of age.  While Swedish children appear to be less inhibited about nakedness, their thinking levels in matters relating to clothes and nakedness show no higher scores than the children in the English-speaking samples."]  [184: "It was obvious from many children's responses that low level thinking as conveyed primarily through parents' modesty training, and that the need for personal body privacy is a strongly inducted value in the four societies in this study."]  [184: "Whether children are less embarrassed by nakedness, or even the thought of it, than previous generations, cannot be deduced from the evidence produced here.  It does indicate, however, that the sex education process in home or school has to overcome well entrenched adult mythologies and rationalizations which prevent children from understanding, accepting, and even enjoying the physical body and its sex organs as natural and normal."]

Goodson, Aileen.  Therapy, Nudity and Joy.  Los Angeles, CA:  Elysium, 1991.  ISBN 1-55599-028-2.  [232: "In 1986, the Reagan administration ordered a follow-up study.  the Attorney General's (Meese's) Commission on Pornography listed four categories of pornographic material: (1) sexually violent; (2) nonviolent but depicting degradation, domination, subordination, or humiliation; (3) nonviolent and nondegrading; and (4) nudity.  The Commission urged prosecution of sexual material portraying violence and felt that substantial exposure to nonviolent but degrading material bore some causal relationship to sexual violence.  They concluded that, in general, scientific evidence showed no causal relationship between exposure to nonviolent, nondegrading sexual material and sexual violence; and they stated that depictions of nudity are not harmful."]

Greeley, Andrew.  Faithful Attraction:  Discovering Intimacy, Love, and Fidelity in American Marriage.  New York:  Tom Doherty, 1991.  pp. 74, 83, 105, 108-109.  [Sexual satisfaction in marriage correlates to comfort with nudity.]  pp. 176-177, 180.  [A Psychology Today study found that 28% of couples under the age of 35 swim in the nude together, 24% of couples age 35-49, and 9% of couples 50 or older.  Further, such activities tended to correspond to a higher level of satisfaction in marriage.]

Hartman, William E., Fithian, Marilyn and Johnson, Donald.  Nudist Society.  Los Angeles, CA:  Elysium Growth Press, Revised Updated Version, 1991.  ISBN 1-55599-041-X.
    SOCIAL STRATIFICATION:  [67: Close similarity between religious habits of the nudist population and that of the national community.]  [69: Nudists spread their religious allegiances over a wide span, as does the general public.]  [76: Seal study "reported that family-group identification was supported through nudist practices because of the unifying influence of nudism on all family members, particularly the children.  There was a greater degree of family cohesiveness resulting from the shared nudist experience during weekend and vacation periods."]  [78-79: Weinberg and Blank/Roth studies found "there is relatively little psychopathology among nudists, and this is particularly true for the female nudists....  They also reported nudist females to be better adjusted than those in several nonnudist groups."]  [79-80: Robinson study found "nudists are very heavily represented in the educational groups whose achievements are much above the typical United States averages."] [86-87: "We found a relatively high degree of educational achievement on the part of our respondents...  If the comparison is made with the United States as a whole, three times the proportion of the nudists respondents have four years of college or more as compared to the U.S. population at large.  ... income of our respondents was approximately 50 percent higher than the income for the most comparable nonnudist group that would represent the California population for the same year."]  [97: The indication clearly is that nudists come from the higher socioeconomic groups rather than from the general population, as they sometimes claim.]
    PERSONALITY:  [99: "All of these average profiles are within normal limits.  The married men are on the average a self-assured group of active and perhaps somewhat impulsive people...  They are free from anxiety and worry, although they take a mildly pessimistic view of the state of the world and of their lives.  They are inclined, as a group, to derive their principal satisfaction from the activities of the moment more than from long-term goals pursued through hardship.  They are generally free from hostility and do not appear to be frustrated or resentful.  Indeed, they may be seen by some as a passive group of men, since they do not show any aggressive or truculent masculinity of attitude and are likely to be considered somewhat gentle by the average American standards."]  [99: "The married women are quite different...  They are utterly normal.  There is nothing in this mean MMPI profile to distinguish it from that of the average American wife.  Some writers have described groups of women like this as full, uninteresting, and placid.  The lucky ones are married to one of them.  These are the women whose central interest lies in their families and their homes.  They are serene, calm, self-assured, contented women, and they derive their greatest satisfaction from their husbands and their children.  They very likely form the foundation of the American character."]  [100: "the mean profiles reveal a group of men and women who are generally normal in their personality characteristics.  As a group, the men are somewhat gentle by the usual American notions of masculinity and may be, like students and professional men, sensitive and perhaps with cultured tastes and interests....  They are somewhat unconventional and do not depend on their male sexuality for their identity or their definition of their role or their feelings of worth.  They are self-assured and possessive of high ego-strength.  As a group, their wives are also self-assured, self-respecting, and confidently feminine in their identification, deriving their satisfaction and feelings of self-worth from their families and homes."] [103: "On the average, the MMPI suggests that a man who practices social nudism is within normal limits in his personality.  Within these limits, he is somewhat of a nonconformist in many ways, active and physically restless, a little discouraged by the world as he perceives it, but quite free from anxiety and personal concern."] [104: "women who fit with this range of MMPI ratings are very effective.  They are stable, dependable, contented, and invest most of their interest in their husbands and children.  They are not usually active outside the home.  The family provides them with satisfactory identity and feeling of worth.  They, like the nudist males, are confident and self assured."]  [104: "In short, the MMPI shows this to be a group much like any other in our population, containing its rebels and malcontents, its disturbed individuals and its unhappy ones, but over-all consisting mostly of normal men and women seeking their own way to fulfillment."]
    SEXUAL BEHAVIOR: [107: "the majority of nudists report frequency of sexual relations remains unchanged as a result of nudism."]  [107: "better than one-third of both males and females indicate that nudism had contributed positively to their sexual happiness in life, while only about 2 percent of our respondents indicate that as a result of practicing nudism, their sexual happiness had decreased.  ... there is little difference between male and female responses."] [113: "Many respondents, both male and female, indicated that if they had been raised as nudists, they would have developed much healthier attitudes toward sex and the human body, and much earlier than they eventually did."]  [122: "In their own summation, many nudists suggested that their sexual behavior was no better and no worse than that of nonnudists--a conclusion that is certainly neither condemning nor congratulatory."]
    MARITAL ADJUSTMENT: [132: "Most of our respondents reported that nudism had been a positive influence in their lives and marriages."]  [134: "Viewing marital adjustment through the eyes of practicing nudists generally reflected nudism to be a unifying and positive influence.  Wives particularly reported the benefits nudist practices had on their husbands and children and thus on their marital and family situations.  Our data support the idea expressed in the nudist literature to the effect that spouses who practice nudism are generally happy in their marriages."]
    NUDIST YOUTH AND CHILDREN: [139-140: "... nudist children may have an advantage over a great many other children in our culture who have never been exposed to the same or opposite sex in the nude.  We view this as a positive aspect of nudism, for both the children and adults.  It not only gives children the opportunity to see that they are like other boys and girls, but it gives parents the opportunity to notice that Johnny and Jane are developing at the same maturational rate as the other youngsters their age."]  [140: "We feel that nudity is helpful in developing relationships, especially with the opposite sex; if the individuals are not 'hung up' on body taboos, they can feel comfortable and at ease in viewing their own bodies as well as that of another.  If they can be comfortable nude, the probability is a great ease in clothed situations."]  [140: "Some writers claim that social nudism destroys sexual interest...  Our research does not support this; it indicates either an increase of interest within marriage or no difference."]  [140: "Some nonnudists have contended that experiencing nudism as children would lessen sexual interests as adults; we, however, are more inclined to view it as a shift in area of importance, from sex per se to that of a total relationship."]  [141: "The nudists to whom we spoke bout their children and nudism, frequently noted that nudism provides a natural form of sex education.  If children are freely able to observe sexual differences, they develop a better understanding of the physical differentiation between genders when parents talk about sex with their children."]  [141: "Many parents point out that their children exhibited no shame or curiosity about their bodies."]  [150: "Since nudist children appear to be well adjusted, nudism can't be a major factor in childhood trauma."]  [152: "Money notes that: 'Fanatical modesty and a phobia of being seen naked, apart from hampering medical care, may severely limit or even destroy sexual functions in adulthood.  Some people cannot have intercourse unless clad.  More extremely, there are some whose pathological modesty prevents sexual arousal in the presence of a partner.' "] [153: "Margaret Mead has made significant observations about the effects of nudity on children in both South Sea Island and American cultures.  Briefly, they are summarized as follows:  (1) Clothing is an alienating factor in establishing our body image and separates us from our bodies.  The dichotomy of the self apart from the body develops in childhood.  (2)  Nudity in clothed Western culture involving children and adults may provide a traumatic distortion for the child because of lack of comparative elements.  In an unclothed society all ranges of humanity of varying sizes, shapes, and descriptions are to be found and compared.  It is significant that comparison of all anatomy be made.  This involves breasts and penises in our society in particular.]  [154: "(5) Because of absence of nudity in our culture, the child loses an important link in learning since he cannot observe the growth process of nude bodies at various maturational states that his body will go through.  (6)  Nudity or partial nudity by no means indicates a lack of modesty among primitive people."]  [155: "We see nudity as a learning experience for a youngster, and as Comfort says, 'The young boy learns not so much that father is bigger and hopelessly more virile than he, as that all men are bigger than he is, and he will one day be a man.' "]  [155: "The child needs to be aware of himself as a developing person and to see nudity in adults so as to be aware of what lies in his future."]  [155: "A prominent Midwest doctor, writer, and counselor dealing extensively with young people attended camp with us, and, as usual, we asked his reaction to the youth.  His impression was that the children were very cooperative with each other, with no conflict situations developing in the course of the observations.  He seemed to think this quite interesting because there seemed to be no concept of 'mine' as found generally in the larger culture, where children seem to be very egocentric in their behavior.  There seemed to be a much greater willingness to share. He was impressed with what he observed and never fails to mention it in correspondence with us."]  [155: "A well known female family counselor, after leading a weekend conference, took the occasion to visit a nudist park with us so as to satisfy her own curiosity about the effects of nudism on families and children.  She, too, was impressed with the children at play.  She observed that there was no appearance of any sense of shame or embarrassment in the boy-girl relationships, and she felt it was a positive, wholesome environment."]  [157: "A warmth and openness among the children existed that we had seldom perceived in a clothed society ..."]
    WHY DO PEOPLE BECOME NUDISTS:  [160: "We found that one of the most valid ways of accepting one's basic biological self is to practice nudism in a social situation."]
    THE EFFECTS OF NUDISM:  [190: "... religious faith remained the same for the majority of our respondents.  It appears that where nudism does affect religious faith, it is much more likely to increase than decrease the religious feelings of participants."] [190: "Several of the men reported an increased dislike for smutty jokes or dirty stories that they had routinely listened to before they began to practice nudism."]
    NUDIST DROPOUTS AND MALCONTENTS:  [195: "It appeared that practicing nudists virtually never give up nudism, even though they may resign from the national organization for reasons not directly related to nudism per se."]  [195: "There was no significant difference in length of membership between males and females."]  [198: "It appears there is a minimum of sexual or racial discrimination among nudists."]  [214: "It is remarkable that a genuine dropout from nudism was virtually impossible to find.  As mentioned earlier, out of 257 respondents we discovered only three.  Almost inevitably, the reasons for discontinuing membership have to do with factors common to any social group in our culture and are certainly not unique to nudist organizations.  Our research shows, overwhelmingly, that nudists rarely drop out of nudism per se.  They may become disillusioned with an individual, or a camp--or with an entire organization--but they do not renounce their commitment to the concept of body-acceptance and the value of family and social nudity.  This was, to say the least, a most informative aspect of our research."]
    NONNUDIST REACTION TO SOCIAL NUDISM:  [279: "Apparently the ability to be nude with strangers of both sexes goes along with a psychological openness and ease in relating, a friendliness and lack of defensiveness which is easier to appreciate than describe.  This situation shatters the idea that the taboo against nudity is strong and deeply ingrained."]  [279: "The speed with which the sexual cue value of nakedness is lost in the nudist environment is amazing as a first experience."]  [279: "The women are not seductive, busy primping, swishing skirts, or tugging at hemlines as occurs when clothed.  There is a quality of honesty or forthrightness..."] [279: "In this situation there is a reduction of tension and a developing sense of exhilaration."]  [281: "This reduction of hostility was strikingly evident in the kindly way in which children were treated.  They were dealt with by parents and others as worthwhile individuals.  There was none of the sharp direction, shoving, pulling, or threatening behavior that adults can be seen exhibiting to children in stores and other public places.  Children were energetic and outgoing, playing together or with adults without bickering and without any show of sexual curiosity or sexual naughtiness."]  [281: "There seemed to be more male-female equality in this context.  both sexes participated in all of the camp activities and there was less segregation into male and female groups than there is in usual social gatherings.  This could relate to reduced need to accentuate or defend sex differences."]  [281: "The sensations of moving air, sunlight, or water on the total body surface provide an unusual total body awareness that adds to the psychological well-being."]
    NUDISM AS A THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY   [301: "The ability to be nude and accept one's basic biological self seems to have positive therapeutic value."]
     PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS AND REACTIONS (HARTMAN):  [313-314: "I was impressed not only by the large number of professional people in nudism, but the presence of ordained ministers of various denominations.  ... it was impressive to me to see the number of such religious individuals who felt nudism was a human experience in which they received much satisfaction."]  [314: "It has been suggested that some kind of trauma occurs when children observe adult genitalia.  My impression is that it is not the nudity per se which is important but the emotional climate in which the nudity takes place."]  [315: "Another impression is that our culture has done a magnificent job in creating much ado about nothing.  This is to say that denying the individual his basic biological identity in social situations is possibly one of the major contribution factors to our mental health problems of the day."]  [315: "I wonder if clothing as a status symbol has not been a major factor encouraging individuals to lose their true identities and to establish false ones."]  [316: "While completely unwilling to allow nudists the opportunity to engage in their legal programs, these people insist on religious freedom and the right to engage in their own legal activities.  This behavior seems contrary to our American heritage.  Our way of life was designed by farsighted individuals who authorized all kinds of group activities to exist and to be engaged in as long as they did not jeopardize or harm the welfare of other individuals, or groups, in our society."]  [317: "It seems to me appropriate that scientists should study all phenomena.  Science could, through such research, discover truths that could free modern man from prejudice and misunderstanding that currently exist about various social phenomena.  We have described nudists as carefully as the tools of modern research allow."]  [317: "It is to be hoped, however, that valid scientific data, such as we have provided in this report, will make it possible for the moralist of tomorrow to adjust society's rules and regulations to leave room for the greatest possible individual human growth, joy, and happiness."]  [317: "But it is within my right as a researcher to raise the question as to whether nudism, which has been demonstrably beneficial to many individuals, should be suppressed legally or morally, or whether a more widespread use of experience of such a phenomenon might be contributory to the growth of the human individual in a particular cultural setting."]  [320: "Not only are there therapeutic implications in nudism but there also is a dimension to biological honesty and self-revelation provided by nudism that has never been considered by any researchers of my acquaintance."]
    THE FUTURE OF NUDISM AND NUDIST RESEARCH: [359: "More general circulation of this viewpoint in the future may contribute to the salubrious conditioning of individuals in our society to accept the nudity of all human beings as wholesome, normal, and natural.  Nudist publications, if judicially presented, may be the most desirable type of material of this kind to be published.  This may diminish the market for other more objectionable materials for which there is so much current demand."]  [349: "Until our society takes a more realistic view of providing opportunities for individuals to be educated about the basic biological differences between the sexes, the current unwholesome climate can be expected to generate curiosity that will, in turn, produce sex offenders in the future."]  [350: "The In-Depth Personality Inventory confirmed our judgment that nudists are relatively normal, well-adjusted individuals.  This is particularly true of females."]  [350: "Female participants in social nudism seem to be unusually well adjusted.  It would be difficult to find a group of adult females in our culture who would provide more normal profiles on in In-Depth personality test than those we have obtained."]  [350: "There are important mental-hygienic implications in social nudism....  In a culture where sizable proportions of the population require the services of professional persons in the alleviation of their mental, emotional, and social problems, the reported relaxation possible in nudist settings is significant.  This shift in emphasis of benefits accruing from nudist practice over the past three decades suggests that the physical benefits primarily significant in the early days of nudism in America now have been replaced by mental benefits."]  [351: "An outstanding finding of our research, completely unsuspected at the beginning and closely related to mental hygiene, is that nudism may be regarded as a therapeutic community."]  [351: "Our four years of research of the nudist phenomenon has confirmed the position taken in 1934 by Dr. Howard Warren that the body taboo is not universal, that its usefulness as a concept is questionable, and that the changing of this supposedly biological taboo may be not only desirable but beneficial for the health and welfare of many individuals in our society."]  [352: "... former nudists almost never discontinue practice....  One is almost persuaded to say, 'Once a nudist, always a nudist.' "]  [352: "Critics who decry a loosening in moral fiber or a trend toward immorality in America may be confusing nudity per se with immorality."]
    NEW RESEARCH AND GENERAL UPDATE: [360-361: "Of those subjects professing a religious faith, we find a decline in active church membership from approximately 50% in Hartman's study to approximately 25% in the present sample. ... These changes are probably indicative of a general sociological phenomenon rather than an effect of social nudism."]
    OTHER STUDIES:  [375: "The studies by Dr. Marilyn Story covered two separate aspects of social nudism.  The first study dealt with body self-concepts....  She found that the body self-concept ratings of nudists and males were higher than those of nonnudists and females, but that nudity as a variable was more important than those of nonnudists and females."]  [375-376: "Her second study dealt with the sexual experience of social nudists (including sexual guilt and sexual inhibitions) compared with that of a matched nonnudist sample.  She found that (a) fewer nudists had experienced less socially acceptable sexual outlets, (b) more social nudists felt guilt about their sexual behaviors, and (c) more social nudists wished they had engaged in a sexual experience they had not experienced.  She also concluded that there is no direct relationship between [social] nudity and sexually permissive behaviors."]  [376: "Dennis Craig Smith, a professor and writer living in Northern California, began a study of adults who had been raised in a nudist environment....  Their conclusion was that children raised as nudists experienced fewer sexual problems as they matured and that they were more satisfied with themselves and with their bodies than were the nonnudist subjects.  Most nudist responders expressed an intent to provide their children with the same nudist background they had enjoyed as they developed."]  [377: "The Smith-Sparks study generally indicated a continued move toward higher education among nudists.  They found that 30 percent of their group had finished high school, 50 % had graduated from college, and 18.4 percent had received a graduate degree.  These percentages are considerably higher than that for the general populace as well as showing a rise from those of any of the earlier studies."]  [378: "Clearly, nude recreation continues to be more attractive to those with a higher education than to those whose schooling is restricted to public school."]  [379: "It appears from our study (and confirmed by Smith and Sparks) that nudist affiliation--even from childhood--in no way damages normal sexual development and enjoyment."]  [391: "After some research, the FBDC commissioned the Gallup Poll to conduct a national survey.  The principal question asked was:  Do you believe that people who enjoy nude sunbathing should be able to do so without interference from officials as long as they do so at a beach that is accepted for that purpose?  The results were startling.  The Gallup Poll reported that 71.6% of the general population answered yes."]  [391: "A second question, Have you ever personally gone skinny dipping or nude sunbathing in a mixed group of men and women either at a beach, a pool, or somewhere else? drew the following responses...  By rough calculation, this translates into something like 30 million Americans over the age of 18 who have had some experience with social nudity.  A generation ago the yes responses probably would have been far less.  We may reasonably assume a greater increase in the future."] [392: "There appears to be something about nudism that changes the mental outlook of persons who experience it.  This change appears to be irreversible."] [--  Thus the need to demonstrate naturism/nudism directly within the context of a communication!  Experience of the reality is how minds and hearts are persuaded.]
    APPENDIX ONE:  SOCIAL NUDISM AND THE BODY TABOO, BY HOWARD C. WARREN, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY:  [400-401: "... it had never before been my fortune to bathe without a suit, in any body of water larger than the household tub.  The new experience exceeded all expectations.  The difference between bathing with even the scantiest suit, and bathing in the nude, can only be compared to the difference between a partial and the total solar eclipse--the phenomena in each case belong to two distinct categories."]  [402: "... I found a vast difference between sunbathing in the solitude of one's own garden, apprehensive lest a neighbor peer through the hedge, and this sunbathing in a group of friendly men and women, without fear of prudish comment.  The first is a task, the other is a recreation.  There is also a peculiar joy in wandering naked through the cool pine woods, whether by day or by moonlight, which is far superior to airbathing in a restricted garden."]  [403: "Foremost in interest to psychologists is the basis of the body taboo.  Is it a fundamental human trait, as many have maintained,--inherited, or at least an inevitable consequence of man's social life?"]  [403: "No one who has been through an experience of social nudity in favorable and proper circumstances will hesitate to answer this in the negative.  In some cases the taboo and its customary responses slough off at once.  On questioning the men stopping at Klingberg, I found that for some the maladjustment lasted only a few minutes, for others it persisted during the first day--after that social nudity seemed perfectly natural and the power of the taboo was entirely broken.  I had no opportunity to find out the duration of the taboo in the women.  It certainly vanished in every case after a short time."]  [403: "But my observations and the reports of others, make it certain that for the normal human individual who is not entirely dominated by the taboo the habitual responses disappear in a remarkably short time."] [404: "Soon the effect is merely the appearance of the 'organism as a whole;' one notices the general contour of the body, whether male or female, rather than any specific sex-distinguishing features."] [405: "During my stay at Klingberg I observed the tendency of men to seek women and chat with them in an unconstrained way.  The slight sex barrier usually noticeable in social gatherings was absent; but there was no petting or flirting, nor trace of ribaldry, no presumptuous behavior based on the exposure of the body."]  [405: "My observations, and the wider experience of others, lead to the conclusion that social nudism does not in any way foster eroticism--that it tends if anything to promote a saner sex outlook and more natural relations between men and women, even during the years of early sexual maturity."]  [406: "The most striking phenomenon in the life at a nudist park is that this taboo disappears almost at once, and without any detrimental effect to one's world view or morals.  One quickly realizes that the human body is not indecent."]  [407: "Two conclusions of considerable psychological importance were satisfactorily established:  (1) Since the traditional body taboo can be readily, almost immediately, broken without detrimental results, it is not a fundamental human trait.  (2) Social nudity is not in itself indecent; only a widespread and persistent social convention has made it so."]  [408: "The writer's observations and the testimony of others indicate that social nudity is not productive of eroticism.  There is less sexual excitement, less tendency to flirt, less temptation to ribaldry, in a nudist gathering than in a group or pair of fully clothed young people."]

Hibbard, R.A.  "Genitalia in human figure drawings: childrearing practices and child sexual abuse,"  Journal of Pediatrics 116(5), 822-8 (1990). [824-825: "Child-rearing practices.  As shown in Table II, no significant differences were found in practices related to sleeping, nudity (very open--not uncommon or unusual for the child to see a nude person--to very modest--uncommon or un-[825]-usual to see a nude person), bathing, discussion of birth, or showering with adult men or women."]  [828: "Examination of potentially intervening and confounding variables did not identify child-rearing practices (such as sleeping, bathing, nudity), exposure to sexually explicit materials, or developmental issues that related to either the allegation of abuse or the drawing of genitalia on a human figure."]  [828: "However, the patterns of children sleeping all or part of the night at least once a month with parents and bathing with siblings or parents is consistent with other reports of healthy children."]

Ilfeld, Fred, Jr. and Lauer, Roger.  Social Nudism in America.  New Haven, CT:  College and University Press, 1964.  [Nudists better educated but otherwise socially and demographically representative of cross-section of American public.]

Jones, Elise F. et al. Teenage Pregnancy in Industrialized Countries.  New Haven:  Yale UP, 1986.  Esp. 11, 18, 223, 229.  [Industrialized nations with fewer hangups about nudity have lower rates of teen pregnancy and abortion.]

Katz, L.  "Nudity at home,"  Parents, 208 (May 1989). [Fence sitting, but makes a good point about difference between modesty and shame.]

(To be continued in one more installment.)


    Bibliography: Abstracts for Legal Defense--Part 5
    by Marvin Frandsen

Nudity--Psychological Health and Positive Social Effects (continued)

Kinsey, Alfred C., Pomeroy, Wardell B., Martin, Clyde E.  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.  Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1948.  ISBN 0-253-33412-8.  [365: "In many cultures, the world around, people have been much exercised by questions of propriety in the public exposure of portions or the whole of the nude body.  There are few matters on which customs are more specific, and few items of sexual behavior  which bring more intense reactions when the custom is transgressed.  These customs vary tremendously between cultures and nations, and even between the individual communities in particular countries.  The inhabitant of the Central American tropics has one custom, the Indian who comes down from his mountain home to trade in the lowland has totally different customs.  There is neither rhyme nor reason to the custom--there is nothing but tradition to explain it.  The mountain Indian of the warmer country of Southern Mexico is thoroughly clothed, the mountain Indian of the coldest part of Northern Mexico is more completely nude than the natives of the hottest Mexican tropics."]  [365: "The English are more or less justly reputed to be the most completely clothed people in the world, and Americans have been slow in breaking away from the English tradition.  The American visitor to foreign lands is often amazed at the exposure which is allowed in some other cultures ... The German nudist movement is assumed by the average American to be immoral in intent, and its counterpart in this country survives only after considerable public discussion and continual wrangling in court over the obscenity of such activity.  Although Anglo-American law has tried for six or seven centuries to define indecent exposure, this is no legal agreement on the decency or indecency of nude art, nor on the rights of art schools, photographers, magazines, and books to portray the nude human form.  Public sentiment, backed by sporadic police action, has dictated the styles of bathing suits, from the gay nineties down to the present.  It is only within the last decade or two that the male's right to appear in swimming trunks without tops has been established for public swimming beaches and pools."]  [365: "More definite limits may be set on nudity than on more overtly sexual activities.  The kissing which is commonplace in American films is considered most immoral in some of the foreign counties to which the films are distributed.  A completely nude art production may be shown in a Latin American moving picture theatre to an audience which takes the film complacently, for its artistic value, although it will hiss the next picture off the screen because it contains a Hollywood kissing scene."]  [366: "The acceptance of nudity may even vary with the hour and the place of the exposure.  The costume which is accepted on the swimming beach is strictly forbidden in most other places.  In the middle of the day, the female may safely expose her arms in public, although she is then limited in regard to the exposure of her back.  At the formal affair in the evening, she may expose the whole of her back, but she is then most proper if she covers her arms with long gloves.  In a Latin American tropic town, inside a public building, there may be considerable objection when one rolls his shirt sleeves to the elbow, even on the hottest summer day; but out of doors both men and women may go stripped to the waist through the streets of the town, and all of them may come together for nude bathing in the nearby stream."] [366: "Most amazing of all, customs in regard to nudity may vary between the social levels of a single community.  In our American culture, there is a greater acceptance of nudity at upper social levels, and a greater restraint at lower social levels.  Compared with previous generations, there is a more general acceptance of nudity in the upper social level today (Table 95).  There is an increasing amount of nudity within the family circle in this upper level.  There is rather free exposure in the home for both sexes, including the parents and the children of all ages, at times of dressing and at times of bathing.  Still more significant, there is an increasing habit among upper level persons of sleeping in partial or complete nudity (Table 95)."]  [367: "Many persons at this [lower] level strictly avoid nudity while dressing or undressing.  They acquire a considerable knack of removing daytime clothing and of putting on night clothing, without ever exposing any part of the body.  This is less often true of the younger generation which has been exposed to the mixture of social levels encountered in the CCC camps, the Y.M.C.A, and the Army and the Navy."]  [367: "Exposure of the upper half of the male body on swimming beaches started as an upper level custom, but the democracy of the public beach has fostered a much wider acceptance of nudity among social levels today."]  [367: "There are some cases of lower level males who have been highly promiscuous, who have had intercourse with several hundred females, and who emphasize the fact that they have never turned down an opportunity to have intercourse except 'on one occasion when the girl started to remove her clothing before coitus.  She was too indecent to have intercourse with!' "]  [575: "Breast manipulation of the sort in which the upper level engages is a source of considerable arousal to the male who provides the manipulation.  There is reason to believe that more males in our culture are psychically aroused by contemplation of the female breast than by the sight of female genitalia.  In the light of this fact, it is interesting to observe the lengths to which censors and law enforcement agencies got to prohibit the exhibition of genitalia, although they frequency allow the display of the nude female breast.  How much of the American male's interest in female breasts is cultural, and how much of it is biologically based, would be an interesting matter to investigate, especially in view of the frequent display of breasts among primitive peoples elsewhere in the world."]  [575: "There are many females who find some specific arousal in breast stimulation, but there may be even more who are not particularly aroused by breast contacts.  Only a few females, perhaps not more than a few percent, are ever brought to orgasm by breast stimulation unaccompanied by genital contacts."]  [575: "It is important to note that females rarely attempt to manipulate male breasts.  This may be due to the greater prominence of the female breast and to the wider knowledge of its eroticism.  Conversely it may be due to the lesser prominence of the male breast and to the general lack of knowledge of its erotic capacities.  It may also be due to the fact that the female is generally less responsive than the male erotically, and for that reason as well as because of social custom less often takes the initiative in any sex play.  At any rate, most males whose experiences are confined to the heterosexual have never had their breast eroticism tested, and it has, therefore, been impossible to obtain data on the percentage in the population as whole who have particularly sensitive breasts.  Among males with extensive homosexual histories, however,  breast manipulation is fairly frequent and it is commonly known in such groups that many males have highly sensitive breasts.  The data from such cases indicate that there may be as many males as there are females who are sensitive to breast stimulation."]

Kinsey, Alfred C.  Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.  Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1953, 1981, 1998.  ISBN 0-253-33411-X.  [586: "The breasts of both the male and the female may be more sensitive than some other parts of the body.  Because of the greater size of the female breast its reactions to tactile stimulation are quite generally known.  Among the infra-human mammals,  the breast rarely plays a part in sexual activity, but among human animals there may be a considerable amount of manual or oral stimulation of the female breast."]  [586-587: "All of this usually stimulates the male erotically, but the significance for the female has probably been [587] overestimated.  There are some females who appear to find no erotic satisfaction in having their breasts manipulated; perhaps half of them do derive some distinct satisfaction, but not more than a very small percentage ever respond intensely enough to reach orgasm as a result of such stimulation (chapter 5).  Some females hold their own breasts during masturbation, coitus, or homosexual activities, evidently deriving some satisfaction from the pressure so applied; but there were only 11 per cent of the females in our sample who recorded any frequent use of breast stimulation as an aid to masturbation."]  [587: "Because of their smaller size the sensitivity of the male breasts has not so often been recognized except among some of the males who have had homosexual experience.  This is undoubtedly not due to differences between heterosexual and homosexual males, but to the fact that relatively few females ever try to stimulate the breasts of their male partners, whereas such behavior is rather frequent in male homosexual relations.  Our homosexual histories suggest that there may be as many males as there are females whose breasts are distinctly sensitive.  A few males may even reach orgasm as a result of breast stimulation."]

Laver, Modesty in Dress, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. [37: "The truth seems to be that in imagination the whole female body is a desirable object.  In practice this is not so, as anyone can testify who has ever visited a nudist camp.  Complete nudity is anti-erotic, as soon as the shock of novelty has worn off; and it does wear off, surprisingly quickly.  If complete nudity were common we should probably become seasonal in our impulses, like the animals.  Our characteristic permanent eroticism is kept alive by clothes."]

Lewis, R.J. and Janda, L.H.  "The relationship between adult sexual adjustment and childhood experiences regarding exposure to nudity, sleeping in the parental bed, and parental attitudes toward sexuality,"  Archives of Sexual Behavior 17(4), 349-362 (1988).  [351: "Gardner (1975) reported that 75% of the world's children sleep in the same room with their parents and others report this observation of parental sexuality to be not harmful ..."]  [357: "The results suggest that childhood exposure to nudity and sleeping in the parental bed are not related to poor sexual adjustment.  In fact, for boys, exposure to nudity in early childhood appears to be modestly related to greater comfort levels with regard to physical contact/affection."]  [357: "It is possible that the nudity experiences are related to increased comfort with sexuality and one's body, and this enables one to feel more comfortable pursuing sexual relationships."]  [357: "It is noteworthy that late childhood (6-11) nudity exposure was modestly related to increased self-esteem and sexual knowledge for males, but not for females, suggesting that there may be a positive side effect of seeing others nude during childhood."]  [359: "Perhaps one of the most important findings of this research, however, is the absence of any relationships between retrospective reports of parental nudity, exposure to nudity in general, sleeping in the parental bed, and sexual adjustment problems."]  [359: "It is clear, however, that there is no basis for the warning of the Cassandras of parental permissiveness regarding sexual issues.  Indeed, it appears that parents who have a casual attitude toward family nudity and who permit their children to sleep in their bed may have children with better self-esteem and who feel more comfortable with their sexuality."]  

"Look and Function", 5.  (Reference missing from "205 Arguments.")  [References 1985 study by Guttmacher Institute which found that rates of pregnancy and abortion among teenage girls in America 2x that of Canada, France, Sweden, England, Netherlands.  Disparity not explained by differences in sexual activity, race, welfare policies, or availability of abortion.  Disparity explained by American youth particularly ignorant of biology and sexuality, partly due to a climate of moral disapproval for seeking such knowledge.  Lower levels of unwanted pregnancy correlated with factors such as amount of female nudity presented by public media and extent of nudity on public beaches.]

"Nude Beaches Help" 5 (Reference missing from "205 Arguments.") [Nations with liberal nudity attitudes have lower teen pregnancy and abortion rates.]

Okami, P.  "Childhood Exposure to Parental Nudity, Parent-Child Co-Sleeping, and 'Primal Scenes': A Review of Clinical Opinion and Empirical Evidence,"   Journal of Sex Research 32(1), 51-64 (Feb 1995).  ["Some of these writers ... have noted the ubiquity of childhood exposure to nudity world-wide and have complained about the lack of empirical data supporting the positions of those who look askance at the practice."]  ["In the second study, Story (1979) described positive effects of exposure to nudity in the context or social nudism. ... it is interesting that no pathogenic effects--indeed, positive effects (more positive 'body self-concept')--were found for a group of children raised in the context of families who had intentionally adapted a nudist lifestyle because its members apparently believed in it--in spite of social disapproval."]  [The authors of the third study (Lewis & Janda, 1988) reported mixed results that may be viewed as positive, negative, or neutral, depending on one's social ideology."]  ["Surprisingly then--especially considering the vehemence with which these behaviors have been condemned in much of the clinical literature--there is little evidence to support dire predictions.  In the case of exposure to parental nudity, the very scant available evidence points to generally neutral or perhaps even positive correlates, particularly for boys."]  ["... scholars in the field of human sexuality recently have emphasized the importance of cultural context in the interpretation of behaviors. ... Experiences such as exposure to parental nudity or sexuality may be constructed of very different 'meanings' within a family whose values include beliefs in the 'naturalness' of nudity and sexuality than within the context of family whose values include endorsement of 'conservative' attitudes toward nudity and sexuality."]

Okami, P., Olmstead, R., Abramson, P., and Pendleton, L.  "Early childhood exposure to parental nudity and scenes of parental sexuality ('primal scenes'): an 18-year longitudinal study of outcome,"  Archives of Sexual Behavior 27(4), 361-384 (1998).[363: "Given the vehemence with which clinicians and child-rearing specialists often condemn childhood exposure to parental nudity, it is paradoxical that their dire predictions are not supported by the (scant) empirical work that does exist.  Findings are at worst neutral or ambiguous as to interpretation, and there is even the implication of possible positive benefits in these studies (particularly for boys) in domains such as self-reported comfort with physical affection (Lewis and Janda, 1988) and positive 'body self-concept' (Story, 1979).  Although these investigations are methodologically limited, their results are consistent with the view of a smaller group of child-rearing specialists and other commentators who have stressed the potential benefits to children of exposure to nudity in the home, in areas such as later sexual functioning, and capacity for affection and intimacy ... the cross-cultural record is not generally explicit on the question of actual exposure of children to parental nudity.  It does, however, present a strong case for the universality of parent-child cosleeping or room sharing ... It may be tentatively inferred that under such conditions large numbers of the world's population of children are exposed to parental nudity."]  [372-375: "Exposure to parental nudity predicted lower likelihood of sexual activity in adolescence, but more positive sexual experiences among that group of participants who were sexually active.  Exposure to parental nudity also predicted reduced instances of petty theft and shoplifting, but this was mediated by a sex of participant interaction indicating that this effect was attenuated or absent for women.  Similarly, exposure to parental nudity was associated at the level of trend with reduced use of drugs such as marijuana, LSD, Ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms, but again, this effect was mediated by a significant sex of participant interaction suggesting that this effect was experienced primarily by men.  Indeed, exposed women were very slightly more likely to have used these drugs."]  [376: "This study, using a longitudinal design, is the first to examine long-term correlates of early childhood exposure to parental nudity and primal scenes.  Consistent with the cross-sectional retrospective literature (and with our expectations), no harmful main effects of these experiences were found at age 17-18."]  [377: "Exposure to parental nudity was associated with positive, rather than negative, sexual experiences in adolescence, but with reduced sexual experience overall.  Boys exposed to parental nudity were less likely to have engaged in theft in adolescence or to have used various psychedelic drugs and marijuana."]  [377: "All findings were independent of the effects of SES, sex of participant, family stability, pathology, 'pronaturalism,' and beliefs and attitudes toward sexuality."]  [379: "... the interesting question becomes:  Why is it so widely believed in the United States and certain European nations that these practices are ultimately detrimental to the mental health of children? ... Such notions, certainly where exposure to parental nudity are concerned, are perhaps better conceptualized as myths."]

Palmer, Gabrielle.  The Politics of Breastfeeding.  London, England: Pandora Press, 1988.  ISBN 0 86358 220 6.  [20: "Any woman who is working in a paid job must certainly not flaunt any signs of fertility.  If her breasts are functioning she must discreetly withdraw to feeder her baby or express her milk, because to suckle a baby in daily public life is too disturbing a sight for the men in charge.  After work those same men may well pay to watch a woman in a strip club expose her breasts for the sexual stimulation of strangers."] [20-21: "Though every [21] part of a women's body has been a focus of eroticism, our era is the first in recorded history where the breast has become a mass fetish for male sexual stimulation, while at the same time its primary function  has diminished on a vast scale.  Perhaps the only parallel is the phenomenon of foot binding in China, when the primary use of a part of the body was sacrificed to serve the cult of a sexual fetishism which symbolised female helplessness.  In our century, women have been presented with an illusion of liberation through the bottle-feeding of babies, only to find their breasts appropriated by men."]  [24: "In the modern world, status and often self-esteem come from a person's role in the structures of wealth creation.  If a woman joins the industrial economy she must be seen to be like a man and it is taken for granted that she must adapt to the 'norm', not that social and economic organisation must adapt to all human beings."]

Renbourn, E.T.  Materials and Clothing in Health and Disease: History, Physiology and Hygiene.  London: H. K. Lewis & Co. Ltd., 1982.  British Standard Book No. 0 7186 0377 X. [473: "Nudity is the garb of primitive man in the tropics and may be accepted in spite of desert heat or mild near-zero cold.  In the early Christian church, nudity was accepted as being proper for baptism.  With the naturist, nudity is a means of escaping from self-consciousness and obtaining stimulation by the elements of sun and moving air."]  [473: "The clothing of the Ku Klux Klan may be frightening to the simple, ignorant or superstitious person especially as the mask may cover the unknown assassins or the mob out for lynching; but almost identical clothing is to be seen in Spain during Holy Week by the congregation wearing the medieval masked costume of the penitents.  Clearly, it is the symbolism and not the clothing which modifies behavior."]  [511: "It is somewhat difficult to understand the psychological basis of nudists.  The naturists are, in general, modest and moral people, intellectual and may be religious or, on the other hand, humanists.  Nudity, it is said, not only gives a sense of freedom, a oneness with nature, but undoubtedly stimulates love of humanity and dislike of aggression and war."]  [511-512: "Nudism is likely to dispel the belief that utter nakedness is synonymous with sin, immorality or obscenity.  It is doubtful whether there is any close relationship between morality, religious beliefs and the amount or type of clothing [512] worn in bed, during the holidays or at any other time."]  [523: "By general medical consent the expression Exhibitionist--Indecent Exposure--refers to an individual, usually a man, in whom there is a periodic, uncontrollable urge, when otherwise fully dressed, to expose sex organs to a female, especially those young and innocent, whilst obtaining sex gratification. ... He normally makes no attempt to expose in front of men or prostitutes, and there is no evidence that he finds any comfort in a nudist camp."]  [557: "This resistance to exposure of what has for so long been covered may explain the early attitude of most women to the mini-skirt and more so to the 'topless' line.  In any case beautiful legs are easier to come by than perfect bosoms.  After a time a new Body Image gets accepted as the norm--a sort of perceptual adaptation.  Men no longer goggle as they did over the mini-skirt as happened when it first appeared."]

Robinson, Julian.  Body Packaging:  A Guide to Human Sexual Display.  Los Angeles:  Elysium Growth, 1988.  ISBN 1-555-99027-4.  [32: "This phenomenon of sexual recompense created by the wearing of various forms of clothing was a remarkable incentive for our ancestors to acquiesce to the church's demand for concealment; particularly with the additional bonus of heightened sexual awareness.  It can be seen, therefore, that modesty is so intertwined with sexual desire and the need for sexual display--fighting but at the same time re-kindling this desire--that a self-perpetuating process is inevitably set in motion.  In fact modesty can never really attain its ultimate end except through its own disappearance.  Hiding under the cloak of modesty there are to be found many essential components of the sexual urge itself, without which our sexual appetites would greatly diminish."]  [100: "The 19th century colonials, of course, condemned native body painting as a pagan and barbaric custom, accentuating nakedness, lacking any sense of Christian modesty and encouraging sexual promiscuity.  Fortunately in more recent times people have come to realize that body painting, like western-style clothing, was just another manifestation of the human desire to belong to a particular cultural group.  And after much study, anthropologists like James Teit declared that body painting had great cultural, social, religious and sexual significance.  Writing on the styles of body painting used by the native Indians of British Columbia he concluded that:  'much of it was ornament, but much also had a strong connection with religion, dreams, guardian spirits, cure of disease, protection, prayers, speech, good luck, war and death.'  And he went on to say that when the young Indians painted themselves 'it was usually to fascinate the opposite sex.' "] [146: "Realising that clothing is a form of self-expression, some governments have, at various times, attempted to control all clothing styles.  They wanted to control the people's hearts and minds, so they started with their exterior symbols--their garments.  They decreed that these garments conform to certain moral and social standards, that they were comfortable and easy to work in, practical and unadorned and that they cover areas of the wearer's anatomy that they thought people may find offensive.  Political control of clothing has been attempted in China, in Cuba and in certain Eastern bloc countries, with the result that the very items of clothing themselves, far from becoming symbols of solidarity and the joy of working for the common good, become highly visible symbols of repression.  Drab and bleak and anonymous, such garments deny man's essential 'humanness'--denying an individual's right to free expression in exactly the same way as a prison uniform."] [146: "Creative dressing is a powerful means of individual expression and is often the first right to be denied by a repressive government."] [170: "We tend to think that our current way of dressing is the only way, the natural way, almost an extension of our own bodies, and we find it almost impossible to view other modes of dress objectively.  Yet we still have an apparent unwillingness to continue with one style for very long, and our obvious dissatisfaction expresses itself in an appetite for constant change--a kind of chain reaction created by the eternal compromise between modesty and display."] [176: "There is a great deal of truth in Robert Burton's contention made in The Anatomy of Melancholy more than two centuries ago:  'The greatest provocations of lust are from our apparel.' "]  [177:" 'It is the adorned and the partially concealed body, and not the naked body, which acts as a sexual excitant.'  Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1901."]  [177-179:"... it has been generally and traditionally accepted that women are not interested in such displays, and that only homosexual and bisexual males find them of interest.  Recent research has found this belief to be quite inaccurate, and tests on the automatic dilation of the pupil of the female eye, which is only brought about by keen sexual interest, has shown that most women are just as [179] sexually interested in a well-proportioned nude male as most males are in a well-proportioned naked female."]

Rudofsky, Bernard.  The Unfashionable Human Body.  Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1971.  ISBN 0-385-05995-7.  [26: "In so-called civilized countries the perpetuation of these fears is guaranteed by the letter (and the arm) of the law.  If legislated modesty serves no other purpose, it makes us acutely aware of our physical self, which is of course exactly the opposite of what it was intended to do in the first place.  In other words, our brand of garment-conditioned prudery is self-contradictory and eventually self-defeating."]

Smith, Dennis Craig and Sparks, Dr. William.  Growing Up Without Shame.  Los Angeles:  Elysium Growth Press, 1986.  ISBN 1-55599-001-0.  [18-27: Theories positing harm to children exposed to nudity lack any empirical basis and are disputed by prominent authorities.]  [27-29: Barbaric superstitious cultural traditions underlie today's common anti-nudity theories.] [108-114: Cultural sense of modesty as per nudity is only a cultural habit, not innate.  Nudity does not equate to sexual stimulation.]  [126: No good studies as to what would offend or harm a child concerning nudity.] [174: "... no one income or social group dominate the free-beach scene.  All age groups are represented, as well as nearly every social level.  If one unifying factor exists, it is that nearly 70% rate themselves as politically moderate or liberal.  Only 14% rate themselves as politically conservative, and 16% say they are politically 'uninvolved,' or 'unconcerned.'" ]  [175: "Many married women said their husbands wanted to come and they just went along.  Of this group, only 15% said they would stop going if it was left up to them.  An amazing 85% said they would come on their own now and were glad their husbands had brought them there."]  [180: Regarding guilts and frustrations developing in a child exposed to nudity, "We didn't find them in the people we interviewed.  We found normal childhood problems of adjustment, but we also found a group of adults seemingly satisfied with themselves, and very willing to raise their children as they were raised, with nakedness as part of their everyday lives."]  [181: "Some even mention that they were able to develop into adults without fear or shame because of the nudity that surrounded them.  None speak of overstimulation."] [181: "It seems clear to us now, after five years of study, that this unfounded bias and conjecture has been very misleading.  But, more than that, it has caused real harm to more than one generation of American children.  It has been, in a way, something akin to doctors telling women in third-world countries that breast feeding could be harmful and that artificial formula was better for their babies."] [182: "We insult ourselves by calling our bodies obscene, pornographic, lewd, base, dirty, immoral, or evil, and in so doing deny the basic truth of our own existence.  Our anatomy is us--and it is none of those terrible things."] [183: "What we learned was that the viewing of the unclothed human body, far from being destructive to the psyche, seems to be either benign and totally harmless or to actually provide positive benefits to the individuals involved."] [187: "The notion that social nudity during childhood is detrimental to the child's normative course of development is largely a cultural belief rather than a demonstrated outcome."] [187: "Prohibitions against nudity are part of the tapestry of our cultural myth, or what Rokeach (1968) calls 'primitive beliefs' which '...have an axiomatic, taken-for-granted character (p. 6).] [187-188: No data to support conjectures of social harm or individual psychological harm from nudity.]  [203: "Few of the respondents indicated any regrets or negative effects about being raised social nudists.  The respondents generally described their childhoods and adolescence as being 'healthy,' 'normal,' and 'unemotional.'"] [203: "Finally, the social nudists provide an endorsement of their upbringing by having indicated that 73.3% of them plan to raise their children as nudists."]

Smith, Jan.  "Breasts."  Clothed with the Sun 1.3, 77 (1981).  Quoting from Male and Female by Margaret Mead.  [Margaret Mead writes, "clothes separate us from our own bodies as well as from the bodies of others.  The more society ... muffles the human body in clothes ... camouflages pregnancy ... and hides breast feeding, the more individual and bizarre will be the child's attempts to understand, to piece together a very imperfect knowledge of the life cycle of the two sexes and an understanding of the particular state of maturity of his or her body."]

Smith, H.W.  "A modest test of cross-cultural differences in sexual modesty, embarrassment and self disclosure,"  Qualitative Sociology 3(3), 223-41 (1980).  [224: "Hartman, et al. (1970:329) reached a number of conclusions in attempting to distinguish active nudists from other groups.  Their findings can be summarized under six statements: (1) the only distinguishing feature of nudists is that they tend to be upper-middle class Caucasian; (2) psychological characteristics of American nudists as measured by the Minnesota Multiphastic Personality Inventory [MMPI] show them to be normal, well-adjusted individuals; (3) social nudism has mental-hygienic benefits (i.e., less obsession with eroticism than among non-nudists); (4) the body taboo is not innate and universal but is cultural and learned; (5) former nudists almost never discontinue their nudist practice; and (6) nudism appears to be increasing in acceptance in the United States."]  [244-245: "The changes which are now taking place on the American scene had occurred some time ago in France and Germany.  For some four decades, the German federal government has reserved parts of public bathing areas for nudists; and it is a common practice in German cities for local governments to open municipal pools to nudists on alternate days.  Public surveys indicate that over one-third of West Germans claim to practice nudism.  While the French had a later start on the nudism scene, they would appear to be catching up fast with the Germans.  Since about 1970 increasing numbers of municipal governments on the French Riviera, while not officially condoning the nudism movement, have judiciously [225] looked the other way while nudists take over public bathing areas.  Indeed, public survey results indicate that over half of the French view nudism as acceptable and wish their government would officially recognize and legalize at least portions of public beaches for nudism."]  [225: "While no comparable statistics exist for the United States, present indications are that only a fraction (albeit a fast-growing fraction) of Americans have engaged in nudism.  Public polling data indicates that less than one out of ten Americans feel it is acceptable to show theatrical productions with nude scenes."]  [225: "Using a typology of low and high context cultures, Hall (1976) presents evidence that Germans are extremely low in cultural context.  They are characterized by individualism, alienation, estrangement from other people, little body contact, low sensitivity to nonverbal cues, segmentation of time and space, etc.  By contrast, he characterized the French, in their personal lives as extremely high context: interacting within closely knit groups, sensitive to nonverbal cues, relatively high amounts of body contact, blurring of time and space scheduling of life events, and so forth.  Americans are characterized on Hall's continuum as somewhere between the French and the Germans on the high-low context continuum."]  [226: "Weinberg concluded that nudists, like non-nudists, have developed a system of norms to regulate and control immodesty, sexuality and embarrassment.  He argues that the basic difference between nudists and non-nudists lies in their differently constructed definitions of the situation."]  [235: "In Hartman, et al. (1970) evidence was presented showing that teenagers are disproportionately underrepresented.  Generally, American nudist families find it hard to interest their teenage children in nudism during the period of formation of their secondary sexual characteristics.  This study indicates that this is true among both French and Germans.  Teenagers were rarely observed on nudist sections of either beach.  At both beaches, parents interviewed provided several extemporaneous laments that their budding teenagers were shy of displaying their new signs of sexuality, although the same children had numerous uninhibited prepubescent experiences on nudist beaches."]  [235: "These systematic and standardized qualitative observations show marked and patterned differences between German and French nudists.  These differences are consistent with the proposed theory on the effects of high and low context cultures on French and German self-disclosure through body contact, sexual and bodily display and embarrassment, and are indicative of considerable divergence with American nudist norms, particularly in the French case."] [235: "It is interesting to note that the Germans are much more similar to Americans than are the French."]  [236: "The correspondence between German and American nudism is not surprising for two reasons.  First, the American nudist movement got its start (and norms) from German immigrants in the first quarter of the century.  Second, the German culture, as Hall points out, is a low context culture which supplies high amounts of information usage and low amounts of body contact."] [239: "Weinberg (1964) in summarizing his typology of immodest behavior (see Figure 1) stated that the only difference between American nudists and non-nudists was cell 1-1: the act of showing one's body in public.  While data on verbal expression was not collected, it has been shown that nudist behavior on French beaches requires different standards.  Erotic overtures of commission and omission were observed frequently enough on French beaches to: (1) question the appropriateness of the Weinberg typology of what is considered immodest there (although not at the German beaches); (2) to suggest that cell 2-1, looking at displays of body or erotic overtures, is specific to low context cultures like Germany and the U.S.; (3) and to suggest, by contrast, that high context cultures like France are more able to routinize sexuality because they have already relatively routinized sensuality.  Hence, such high context cultures may more easily separate sensuality from sexuality."]  [239: "Earlier, this paper noted that nudism practice is expanding and changing rapidly in the U.S. along lines which occurred earlier in Germany and then France.  The earliest nudists were disproportionately urban and upper-middle class.  The rapid expansion of nudism in Germany and France indicates diffusion to other groups.  Since nudism is undergoing a similar expansion in parts of the U.S., it is likely that similar equalitarianism trends are and will be taking place.  This has implications for normative change, given the first adherents to social movements tend to be predictably different from later joiners ..."]

Smith, H.W.  "Does shedding one's clothes imply shedding one's culture?  A cross-cultural test of nudism claims," International Review of Modern Sociology 10(2), 255-68 (1980). [German and French cultural views of use and meaning of territory not affected by nudist practices, implication being that basic cultural views and habits are not affected by nudism, implication being that nudism isn't going to turn people into mindless criminals.]  [266: "Nevertheless, the mostly non-verbal, unobtrusive nature of our five indicators of territoriality support the more verbal studies by Weinberg (1965-1970) and Hartman et al. (1970) that nudists differ from non-nudists only basically in their desire to sunbathe in the nude.  Their territorial behavior appears quite 'normal' from the analyses presented in this paper.  What nudists do appears to be quite normal when compared to what certain groups say nudists do or say nudism does to people.  Deeply embedded cultural differences of the type tested simply are not shed by shedding one's clothes."]

Story, M.D. "Factors associated with more positive body self-concepts in preschool children." The Journal of Social Psychology 108, 49-56 (1979).  [49: "Research over the past two and half decades has consistently supported the premise of this study that body self-concept is an important part of overall self-concept because a person must function within the physical reality of his/her body ... Negative or lower body self-concept scores have been associated with undue anxiety regarding pain (26); an increased number of somatic symptoms (9); a lessened ability to enter into intimate expressive relationships (5,6); and a decrease in motor abilities (22)."]  [50: "Nudity classification of the family also appeared to be a factor related to body self-concept, but no previous studies including body self-concepts of social nudists were found."]  [53: "... nudism was found to be a more important variable than sex.  Social nudist males scored higher than nonnudist males and higher than nonnudist females.  Social nudist females scored higher than nonnudist females, and also scored higher than nonnudist males."]  [53-54:"... the relationship between body part liked least and nudity classification was significant (p < .001) with nudists most often answering they had no body part they least liked while nonnudists most [54] often named genitals as least liked."]

Story, M.D.  "Comparisons of body self-concept between social nudists and nonnudists."   Journal of Psychology 118(1), 99-112 (1984). [99: "Research dating from the first body self-concept studies ... has consistently supported the premise of the present study that body self-concept is an important part of overall self-concept.  Little research, however, has been done examining the differences in body self-concept between subculture groups, such as social nudists, and their nonnudist counterparts in the United States."]  [103-104: "Contrary to Meares's theory (1980) and the correlations between body self-concept and interpersonal relationships found in other literature [104] ... no difference in body self-concept scores was found according to ratings on any of the four relationships questions."]  [105: "Social nudist males had the most effectiveness ratings, followed in order by social nudists females, nonnudist males, and nonnudist females.  The reverse ordering was true for the most attractiveness ratings.  These findings generally support those of other studies on reasons for body self-concept ratings ... and indicate that persons with higher body self-concepts are likely to judge their body aspects more on effectiveness than on attractiveness."]  [107: "No strong factors were found for either social nudist males or females.  The strongest factor, Relationships (with the same loading items as with nonnudists) accounted for 7.8% of the variance in nudist males' scores and 5.8% of the variance in nudist females' scores.  No other factor accounted for more than 5% of the variance for either nudist males or females.  The lack of ability to extract strong factors from the body self-concept ratings of social nudists seems to indicate that nudist body self-concept is either so variable from individual to individual that it follows no pattern structures or so general that it does not relate to particular perceptual groupings of body aspects."]  [111: "This study found that body self-concept ratings and reasons for those ratings varied more according to nudity classification than according to traditional sex differences.  The body self-concept ratings of social nudists were higher than those of nonnudists and were based more on effectiveness and holistic thinking than those of their nonnudist counterparts.  The results from this study's nonnudist sample generally reinforced the belief that a small number of factor structures accounts for a majority of the variance in body self-concept ratings."]

Story, M.D.  "A Comparison of Social Nudists and Non-Nudists on Experience with Various Sexual Outlets."  Journal of Sex Research 23(2), 197-211 (1987).  [Nudists have significantly less casual premarital and extramarital sex, group sex, incest, and rape.]  [197: "The issue of the effects of nudity on sexual behavior is rampant with opinion and emotion but has been the subject of very little research."]  [198: "In contrast, Prescott (1978) exemplifies many professionals on the other side of the issue when he testified that 'you see no great problems of sexual disturbances in such families that practice family nudity' (p. 21).  Smith (1981) studied 60 adults raised as social nudists and found that overall they had better mental health than the general population as well as quite positive attitudes about their nudist upbringing and that 73.3% planned to raise their own children as nudists.  The key to these apparently irreconcilable views of nudity's effect on sexual behavior may be that nudists mentally separate nudity and sex and see nude bodies as 'natural' and 'pure' rather than sexually arousing ..."]  [204-205: "The first hypotheses was partially supported, as social nudists were found to have had less experience than non-nudists with 6 of the 12 items hypothesized to have lower nudist than non-nudist participation.  Social nudists were less likely than nudists to have (a) had premarital intercourse with a person other than an intended marriage partner ... (b) had sexual experience with a person of their own sex before or during adolescence ... (c) had extramarital [sic] sexual experience ... (d) had group sex experience ... (e) taken unfair advantage of a person for selfish reasons ... or (f) had sexual contact with a family member other than a spouse."]  [205: "As expected, there were no differences between social nudists and non-nudists on the seven sexual outlets viewed as more socially acceptable or less influenced by social mores ..."]  [205: "Social nudists were more likely than non-nudists to find it difficult to forgive themselves for a sexual behavior they had done ... Although about equal numbers of nudists and non-nudists regretted a sexual behavior, nudists were more likely to hold on to their guilt by not forgiving themselves for sexual behaviors."]  [207: "No differences in responses on the 22 items were found within either the social nudists or the non-nudist group by education level or marital status, rejecting the sixth hypothesis of differences according to these variables."] [208: "The results support the idea that, for social nudists, nudity is not related to more permissive sexual behavior.  The results actually suggest nudists and non-nudists are alike in many of their sexual behaviors."]  [209: "... nudity is usually a more important variable than sex in determining experience with less socially acceptable sexual outlets because nudist men had less experience than non-nudist women."]  [209: The lower rate of nudist participation in less socially acceptable sexual behaviors lends support to the view that nudists hold a stricter code of sexual conduct than non-nudists.  This conclusion agrees with those of Weinberg 91971) and Hartman et al. (1971), as well as the beliefs of most authors writing about nudist behavior; they conflict with these of DeMartino (1969).  It appears that nudists, or at least those who are members of nudist clubs, may identify with the conservative mores of organized social nudism rather than seeing nudity as directly connected to sexual arousal.  The fact that more nudists compared to non-nudist were found to retain sexual guilt, even though fewer of them had experience with socially less acceptable sexual outlets, is further evidence that nudists judge themselves by a stricter code of conduct than non-nudists."]  [210: "... this study illustrates that there is not always a direct relationship between nudity and sexually permissive behaviors."]

Story, M.D.  "Personal and professional perspectives on social nudism: Should you be personally involved in your research?"   Journal of Sex Research 29(2?), 111+ (1993). [Personal review of advantage of being a nudist when researching nudists.  Review of peer and other controls on quality of research so that objectivity is not compromised.]

Sussman, S.A. "Body disclosure and self-disclosure -- relating two modes of interpersonal encounter."  Journal of Clinical Psychology 33(4), 1146-1148 (1977). [1146-1147: "A social nudity experience was provided for one group (a day at a local nudist campground), an outing day was provided for the second group, and the naive group received no treatment.  Two weeks post-treatment, mixed-sex pairs of S[ubjects]s reported for testing ..."] [1147: "These experimental results supported the hypothesis that Ss who participated in a body-disclosing treatment would relate significantly more openly to each other in a future, clothed meeting than would control Ss.  In addition, it was discovered that the effect on each person's level of self-disclosure generalized beyond a body-sexual content of disclosure topic.  This is impressive because it might be expected that, at best, one's experience of body disclosure would affect only his disclosures on topics of similar experiential reference.  Although persons in our culture are often defensive, this research suggests that when they undress with others in a socially acceptable environment, their experience of body disclosure can help them to suspend verbal defenses and participate in honest dialogue, even after they are clothed again.  Furthermore, they experience accepting and warm responses from others during the body-disclosing episode and tend to like themselves better afterward."]

Vingerhoets, A. and Buunk, B. "Attitudes toward nudist and public beaches:  Some evidence of dissonance reduction and gender differences."  Journal of Leisure Research 19(1), 13-21 (1987). [13-14: "Over the past decade, nudist recreation in the Netherlands has, from a somewhat sectarian lifestyle, developed into a practice attracting large seg- [14] ments of the population.  An increasing number of both official and unofficial nudist beaches have cropped up, and since a change in the law took place in 1985, many beaches can be used for nudist recreation if the visitors feel it is appropriate.  It is estimated that there are currently far more than a hundred nudist beaches in the Netherlands, attracting at least one million visitors annually.  In Dutch opinion polls this development is clearly reflected.  For example, the percentage of those opposing nudist recreation in especially designated areas decreased from 71% in 1968 to 33% in 1981 (Weeda, 1983).  A similar, though less pervasive, development seems to have occurred in other Western countries.  As Smith (1980) has noted, nudism in the United States has grown at a rate neither predicted nor anticipated and has spread to public bathing areas on both sea coasts so that the original voluntary association flavor has been lost ..."]  [14: "Two specific hypotheses are tested.  The first hypothesis is derived from cognitive dissonance theory ... According to this theory, people who have to choose from two alternatives, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages, will experience cognitive dissonance once they have made a decision.  The more negative aspects there are to the chosen option, the greater this dissonance ... people who practice nudism recreation will in most cases have made a conscious decision to practice a pattern that is still more or less deviant.  They will therefore experience more cognitive dissonance than visitors to public beaches."]  [14: "Dissonance theory would predict that such dissonance will be reduced by emphasizing the positive aspect of the chosen alternative, i.e., nudist recreation, and devaluating the rejected alternative, i.e. recreating in bathing attire.  A similar need for dissonance reduction will be less prevalent among visitors to public beaches.  Thus, the tendency to emphasize the positive aspects of their own type of recreation, and the negative aspects of the non-practiced form of recreation, will be less pronounced in this group."]  [14: "A second hypothesis concerns gender differences.  Opinion polls indicate that men are more in favor of nudist recreation than women (Weeda, 1983).  The most plausible explanation for the observed gender difference is that ... a number of men are attracted to nudist beaches by the possibility of watching nude female bodies.  There is plenty of evidence that men are in general more interested in, and more sexually [15] aroused by the sight of a nude body of the opposite sex than women are ... Furthermore, it is not unlikely that this is the same reason women are not attracted to nudist beaches: they do not like the idea of having their nude bodies exposed to men."]  [15: "However, it seems likely that these perceptions hold only for people who do not practice nudist recreation themselves.  For men who start going to nudist beaches, the numerous female bodies will, probably within a short period of time, lose much of their originally exciting value, if it ever existed ... As a consequence of this, women might feel comfortable on a nudist beach and find it particularly attractive given the possibility of getting a tan all over.  It is therefore expected that among visitors to normal beaches, nudist recreation will be more positively evaluated by men than by women, while the opposite may occur among visitors to nudist beaches."]  [15: "The subjects were approached on four inland beaches in the Netherlands.  Two were 'open' beaches where nudist recreation was officially permitted.  Nudist recreation was not allowed at the two other beaches (referred to here as public beaches)."]  [19: "... subjects judged their own recreational form as being more positive than the other.  As expected on the basis of our fist hypothesis, the difference between the opinions of both types of recreation was greater within the nudist group than within the public beach group.  As predicted on the basis of cognitive dissonance theory, the attitudes in the nudist group were more polarized: they evaluated their own recreational form more positively and the other recreational form more negatively than the public beach group."]  [19-20: "... men in the public beach group evaluated nudist recreation more positively and recreation in bathing suits less positively than the women in this group. [20] Noted differently: among women who go to public beaches, attitudes were relatively polarized.  They were more positive about recreating in bathing attire and more negative about nudist recreation than the men were.  These data are in line with the second hypothesis.  However, other data were only partially compatible with this hypothesis.  Although, the women within the nudist group judged recreation in bathing attire more negatively than the men did, men and women had the same opinion about nudist recreation."]  [20: "Following dissonance theory, we can argue that nudist recreators experienced cognitive dissonance by choosing a socially less accepted form of leisure time spending, and reduced this dissonance by describing their behavior as, among other things, much more healthy, natural, modern, open and peaceful.  Of course, persons going to public beaches, too, evaluated their own behavior as more positive, and viewed their own behavior as, among other things, more meaningful and cozy than nudist recreation.  Thus, among both groups there is a clear tendency to describe one's own recreational behavior in more positive terms."]  [20: "Further, in contrast to the assumed importance of getting  tan all over, women on the nudist beach did not evaluate their own recreational form more positively than the men did.  This could be the consequence of a 'ceiling effect', in the sense that a more positive evaluation in any group could hardly be expected.  Another explanation is that the positive aspects are overshadowed for women by negative experiences, such as 'peeping' and other annoying male behavior.  That such behaviors are far from uncommon on nudist beaches, is indicated by the Study of Douglas et al. (1977)."]  [21: "Finally, some limitations of the sample must be pointed out.  First, the differences between both recreational groups can partially be confounded with differences in educational level and political preference, since the two groups differed in these respects.  It is unlikely, however that these differences can explain the polarization of attitudes in the nudist group.  There is no reason to assume that persons with higher educational backgrounds and liberal political ideas, have a relatively pronounced tendency to give more extreme answers."]  [21: "A second limitation of the sample is the fact that the data were collected on inland beaches in The Netherlands, and probably cannot be generalized to coastal beaches and other countries.  Thirdly, the findings presented here concern only non-organized nudist recreation.  It could well be that members of nudist organizations would make different evaluations and have more outspoken opinions than the group studied here."]  [21: "Despite these limitations, the present study offers a beginning of insight into the attitudes and motives with regard to an increasingly popular form of recreation."]

Warren, Howard C.  "Social Nudism and the Body Taboo."  Psychological Review 40, 160-183 (1933).  (Reprinted in Nudist Society.)

Weinberg, Martin S.  "Sexual Modesty, Social Meanings, and the Nudist Camp."  Social Problems 12.3, 311-18 (Winter 1965).  {Also in Deviance: the Interactionist Perspective.  Eds. Early Rubington and Martin S. Weinberg, Rutgers University. New York: The MacMillan Company (1968).  pp. 271-279.}  [312: "The assumption underlying this focus is that stable social meanings are products of a social standardization process, being controlled by the 'molds' which social organization imposes on patterns of sociation."]  [312: "Modesty is a form of reserve."] [313: "The manifest function of sexual modesty (i.e., those consequences evaluated by common-sense rationality) is maintenance of social control over latent sexual interests.  Common-sense conceptions of modesty also put most emphasis on the covering of the body when in the presence of the opposite sex for the performance of this function.  Considerations of a breakdown in clothing modesty bring forth images of rampant sexual interest, promiscuity, embarrassment, jealousy, and shame."]  [314: "The ideology of the nudist camp provides a new definition of the situation regarding nudity, which in effect that maintains [sic]: (1) nudism and sexuality are unrelated (2) there is nothing shameful about exposing the human body (3) the abandonment of clothes can lead to a feeling of freedom and natural pleasure (4) nude activities, especially full bodily exposure to the sun, leads to a feeling of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being."]  [314: "These definitions are sustained by nudists to a remarkable degree ... The results of the field work and formal interviews indicate how the social organization of the nudist camp has developed a system of norms which contribute to sustaining the official definition of the situation."]  [318: "Our results make possible some general conclusions regarding modesty: (1) Covering the body through the use of clothes is not a necessary condition for a pattern of modesty to exist, nor it is [sic] required for tension management and social control of latent sexual interests.  Sexual interests are very adequately controlled in the nudist camp experiment; in fact, those who have visited nudist camps agree that sexual interests are controlled to a much greater extent than they are on the outside.  Clothes are also not a sufficient condition for a pattern of modesty, the manipulation of clothes and fashion in stimulating sexual interest is widely recognized.  (2) Except for clothing immodesty ... all other forms of modesty are maintained in a nudist camp (e.g., not looking, not saying, not communicating erotic overtures).  This suggests that the latter proscriptions are entirely adequate in achieving the functions of modesty when definitions regarding the exposure of the body are changed. (3) When deviance from the institutionalized patterns of modesty is limited to one cell of our typology, (i.e., clothing is dispensed with), and the definition of the situation is changed, the typically expected consequence of such a breakdown in this normative pattern does not occur.  Rampant sexual interest, promiscuity, embarrassment, jealousy, and shame were not found to be typical of the nudist camp."]

Weinberg, Martin S.  "Nudist Camp, Way of Life and Social Structure."  Human Organization 26.3, 91-99 (Fall 1967). [94: "Nudist camps cater primarily to married couples and their children.  For example, 82 percent of the people in the interview sample were married."]

Weinberg, Martin S.  "Becoming a Nudist."  Deviance: The Interactionist Perspective.  Eds. Earl Rubington and Martin S. Weinberg.  New York:  MacMillan, 1968.  Library of Congress catalog card number: 68-12719.  Reprinted from Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes, Vol. 29, No. 1 (February 1966).  [240: "Thus when nudist members were asked what they had thought of nudism before visiting a camp, 50 percent stated that they had never really given it any thought."] [241: "... the highest percentage of men mentioned magazines as the source of their interest, and the next largest source was other persons (exclusive of parents or parents-in-law).  For women, the pattern was different; the highest percentage were first informed about nudism by their husbands.  In 78 percent of the families, the husband had been more interested in visiting a camp."]  [242: "Even though they had enough confidence to make the decision to visit a camp, the respondents did not necessarily anticipate becoming nudists themselves.  For many the first trip was merely a joke, a lark, or a new experience, and the main motivation was curiosity."]  [244: "Asked if they ever had any doubts that becoming a nudist was the right decision, once they had made up their minds, 77 percent reported that they never had any doubts.  Fourteen percent had doubts at the time of the interview."]  [244: "And this new reality imposes a different meaning on the everyday life of the outside world:  'My daughter told us today the boys and girls don't sit together at school, but it makes no difference to her.  Several times they're out playing and the boys get excited when they see their panties.  My children don't understand that.  They have a different state of mind toward different sexes.' "]  [244-245: "Persons who became nudists--that is, became members of a camp and conceived of themselves as nudists--usually demonstrated an autonomy of motives, in the sense that their motives for doing so differed from their motives for first visiting a camp."] [245: "Three of the benefits cited are of special sociological interest--the concept of nudist freedom, the family-centered nature of the recreation, and the emphasis on friendliness and sociability."] [247: "Participation in nudism did not, however, always lead to increased family cohesiveness.  For example, if one spouse did not appreciate the experience, the family's continued participation resulted in increased strain.  And although nudist ideology claims that nudist participation brings the family closer together, 78 percent of the interviewees, and 82 percent of the questionnaire respondents, reported no change in their family relationships."]  [247: "In addition, nudists extended the concept of 'family' to include fellow nudists; they cited a 'togetherness' that is rare in the clothed society."]  [247: "Several blue-collar workers remarked that one of the things they liked about nudism was that, without their uniforms or customary clothes, they and their families could associate with a better class of people.  Status striving decreases with the removal of these important props of impression management."]  [248: "Although these statements may be somewhat idealized, the nudist camp does effectively break down patterns common to country clubs, resorts, and other settings in the outside society.  Sex, class, and power lose much of their relevance in the nudist camp, and the suspension of the barriers they create effects a greater unity among the participants.  This is not to say, however, that there is no social hierarchy ..."]  [248: "Clothing modest is a ceremony of everyday life that sustains a nonintimate definition of relationships, and with its voluntary suspension relationships are usually defined as closer in character."]

Weinberg, Martin S.  "Embarrassment:  Its Variable and Invariable Aspects."  Social Forces 46, 382-88 (1968).[385: "Nudists were found to be resocialized to view heterosexual nudity in a special way.  The official rules of interpretation to which participants are socialized are that:  (a) nudism and sexuality are unrelated, (b) there is nothing shameful about exposing the human body, (c) the abandonment of clothes can lead to a feeling of freedom, and (d) nude activities, especially full exposure to the sun, lead to a feeling of physical, mental and spiritual well-being.  The first two statements, which refer to the acceptability of heterosexual nudity, are the 'deviant' aspect of the ideology.  The fact that these definitions of the situation are, however, effectively sustained, precludes embarrassment as an emotion relevant to nudity."]  [387: "Since the nudist camp provides its participants with new interpretations of heterosexual nudity, the old interpretations can be kept out of play, emotions such as shame, guilt, or sexual jealousy lose any relation to heterosexual nudity."]  [388: "If people are effectively socialized to a non-sexual interpretation of nudity and this rule of interpretation is sustained, then sexual, moral, and emotional responses that are commonly associated with heterosexual nudity become phenomenally absurd.  Because interpretations become tied to social establishments, the reality sustained by the establishment determines what elicits an emotion."]

Weinberg, Martin S.  "The Nudist Management of Respectability: Strategy for, and Consequences of a Situated Morality."  Deviance and Respectability:  The Social Construction of Moral Meanings.  Ed. Jack D. Douglas.  New York:  Basic, 1970.  375-403.

Westheimer, Ruth and Louis Lieberman.  Sex and Morality:  Who Is Teaching Our Sex Standards?  Boston:  Jovanovich, 1988.  [Young people who had casually seen both of their parents nude in the home were far more likely to feel comfortable with their bodies and also feel more satisfied with the size and shape of their genitalia and breasts.] [61: "We can't help but believe that such repeated messages about how the body must be covered, even in front of parents and siblings, helps to create a negative body self-image and, consequently, lowered self-esteem.  Many persons who work with problems of youth have come to recognize the social and mental-health implications when young people do not think very highly of themselves.  There are even suggestions that the euphoria of drug use is sought by many to overcome these negative feelings about one's self.  In our private practices, where we treat people with sexual dysfunctions as well as other interpersonal problems, we see patients who remember feeling uncomfortable about their bodies from childhood on.  How much of this can be traced directly back to parental prohibitions is not known, but the frequency with which the people we interviewed suggested this is not insignificant."]  [72: "One of the few studies on this subject was conducted by Lou Lieberman in the late 1960s when he was on the faculty at the State University of New York at Albany.  In a survey of over 250 students, he found that those young people who had casually seen both of their parents nude in the home (with no sexual overtones of course) were far more likely to feel comfortable with their bodies and to also feel satisfied with the size and shape of their genitalia and breasts.  This may seem like trivial research to some, but is body self-image not a major aspect of self-esteem?"]

Wildman, Robert W., Wildman, Robert W. II, Brown, Archie and Trice, Carol.  "Note on Males' and Females' Preferences for Opposite-Sex Body Parts, Bust Sizes, and Bust Revealing Clothing."  Psychological Reports 38.2, 485-86 (April 1976).  [485: "In regard to amounts of chest hair, 24 (46%) answered that they preferred a 'Very Hairy Chest,' 24 (46%) answered in favor of a 'Moderately Hairy Chest,' and 4 (8%) responded that they preferred a 'Bare Chest.' "]  [485: "Female subjects were shown photographs of the well-formed legs, buttocks, chest, and penis of males.  They were asked to rank these from most (number 1) to least (number 4) 'sexually stimulating.'  Twenty-four subjects (51%) ranked the chest as most sexually stimulating.  11 subjects (23%) rated the penis as number 1, 8 (17%) ranked legs as most stimulating, and 4 subjects (9%) ranked buttocks number 1.  The male body parts were given weighted scores by assigning 4 for being chosen most 'sexually stimulating,' a 3 for being ranked second, etc.  The weighted scores were:  chest, 148, legs, 111; buttocks, 103; and penis, 103."]  [485-486: "Male subjects were asked to rank from most to least sexually stimulating the buttocks, busts, legs, and genitals of females.  Thirteen subjects (38%) chose busts, 8 (24%) chose buttocks, 7 (21%) genitals, and 6 (18%) legs.  The female body parts were given [486] weighted scores in the same manner as the male body parts.  Resulting weighted scores were: bust, 103, buttocks, 94; legs, 73; and genitals, 70."]

Wilson, Diane Lee.  The Impact of Gender Role Socialization and Female Development on Adult Sexuality in Lesbians.  Dissertation, The Wright Institute, 1987.  [Childhood exposure to parental nudity helped children have less adult sexual anxiety.]


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